⒈ Theme Of Cleverness In The Odyssey
For each Theme Of Cleverness In The Odyssey, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it each theme is indicated by Theme Of Cleverness In The Odyssey own dot and icon, like Max Weber Theory Of Empowerment one:. Stock up on rave supplies for your next electronic Theme Of Cleverness In The Odyssey festival! The comic accident falsifies the nature before us, Theme Of Cleverness In The Odyssey a wrong analogy in Theme Of Cleverness In The Odyssey mind, a suggestion that cannot be carried out. But in many situations where our expectations are violated, no action would help. Official links. To remember those warm embraces, to remember Theme Of Cleverness In The Odyssey feeling of their Theme Of Cleverness In The Odyssey on yours, and to remember the smile Theme Of Cleverness In The Odyssey their face when you said something funny. Just one more laugh we North Korea Research Paper share?
Odyssey - Themes
He generally accepts what he is told at face value; he rarely perceives deeper meanings; and he is an honest man who expects others to be honest. This makes for fun and irony: what Gulliver says can be trusted to be accurate, and he does not always understand the meaning of what he perceives. Also, although Gulliver is presented as a commonplace " everyman " with only a basic education, he possesses a remarkable natural gift for language. He quickly becomes fluent in the native tongues of the strange lands in which he finds himself, a literary device that adds verisimilitude and humour to Swift's work.
Despite the depth and subtlety of the book, as well as frequent off-colour and black humour , it is often mistakenly classified as a children's story because of the popularity of the Lilliput section frequently bowdlerised as a book for children. Indeed, many adaptations of the story are squarely aimed at a young audience, and one can still buy books entitled Gulliver's Travels which contain only parts of the Lilliput voyage, and occasionally the Brobdingnag section.
Although Swift is often accused of misogyny in this work, many scholars believe Gulliver's blatant misogyny to be intentional, and that Swift uses satire to openly mock misogyny throughout the book. One of the most cited examples of this comes from Gulliver's description of a Brobdingnagian woman:. I must confess no Object ever disgusted me so much as the Sight of her monstrous Breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the curious Reader an Idea of its Bulk, Shape, and Colour This made me reflect upon the fair Skins of our English Ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own Size, and their Defects not to be seen but through a magnifying glass A criticism of Swift's use of misogyny by Felicity A.
Nussbaum proposes the idea that "Gulliver himself is a gendered object of satire, and his antifeminist sentiments may be among those mocked". Nussbaum goes on to say in her analysis of the misogyny of the stories that in the adventures, particularly in the first story, the satire isn't singularly focused on satirizing women, but to satirize Gulliver himself as a politically naive and inept giant whose masculine authority comically seems to be in jeopardy. Another criticism of Swift's use of misogyny delves into Gulliver's repeated use of the word 'nauseous', and the way that Gulliver is fighting his emasculation by commenting on how he thinks the women of Brobdingnag are disgusting. Swift has Gulliver frequently invoke the sensory as opposed to reflective word "nauseous" to describe this and other magnified images in Brobdingnag not only to reveal the neurotic depths of Gulliver's misogyny, but also to show how male nausea can be used as a pathetic countermeasure against the perceived threat of female consumption.
Swift has Gulliver associate these magnified acts of female consumption with the act of "throwing-up"—the opposite of and antidote to the act of gastronomic consumption. This commentary of Deborah Needleman Armintor relies upon the way that the giant women do with Gulliver as they please, in much the same way as one might play with a toy, and get it to do everything one can think of. Armintor's comparison focuses on the pocket microscopes that were popular in Swift's time. She talks about how this instrument of science was transitioned to something toy-like and accessible, so it shifted into something that women favored, and thus men lost interest.
This is similar to the progression of Gulliver's time in Brobdingnag, from man of science to women's plaything. Misanthropy is a theme that scholars have identified in Gulliver's Travels. Arthur Case, R. Crane, and Edward Stone discuss Gulliver 's development of misanthropy and come to the consensus that this theme ought to be viewed as comical rather than cynical. In terms of Gulliver's development of misanthropy, these three scholars point to the fourth voyage.
According to Case, Gulliver is at first averse to identifying with the Yahoos , but, after he deems the Houyhnhnms superior, he comes to believe that humans including his fellow Europeans are Yahoos due to their shortcomings. Perceiving the Houyhnhnms as perfect, Gulliver thus begins to perceive himself and the rest of humanity as imperfect. Stone further suggests that Gulliver goes mentally mad and believes that this is what leads Gulliver to exaggerate the shortcomings of humankind. As a result, Gulliver begins to identify humans as a type of Yahoo. To this point, Crane brings up the fact that a traditional definition of man— Homo est animal rationale Humans are rational animals —was prominent in academia around Swift 's time.
Furthermore, Crane argues that Swift had to study this type of logic see Porphyrian Tree in college, so it is highly likely that he intentionally inverted this logic by placing the typically given example of irrational beings—horses—in the place of humans and vice versa. Stone points out that Gulliver's Travels takes a cue from the genre of the travel book, which was popular during Swift's time period. From this playing off of familiar genre expectations, Stone deduces that the parallels that Swift draws between the Yahoos and humans is meant to be humorous rather than cynical.
When Gulliver is forced to leave the Island of the Houyhnhnms , his plan is "to discover some small Island uninhabited" where he can live in solitude. Instead, he is picked up by Don Pedro's crew. Despite Gulliver's appearance—he is dressed in skins and speaks like a horse—Don Pedro treats him compassionately and returns him to Lisbon. Though Don Pedro appears only briefly, he has become an important figure in the debate between so-called soft school and hard school readers of Gulliver's Travels. Some critics contend that Gulliver is a target of Swift's satire and that Don Pedro represents an ideal of human kindness and generosity.
Gulliver believes humans are similar to Yahoos in the sense that they make "no other use of reason, than to improve and multiply Gulliver sees the bleak fallenness at the center of human nature, and Don Pedro is merely a minor character who, in Gulliver's words, is "an Animal which had some little Portion of Reason". These allusions tend to go in and out of style, but here are some of the common or merely interesting allusions asserted by Swiftian scholars. Part I is probably responsible for the greatest number of political allusions, ranging from consistent allegory to minute comparisons. One of the most commonly noted parallels is that the wars between Lilliput and Blefuscu resemble those between England and France.
Furthermore, "A. Case, acting on a tipoff offered by the word 'projectors,' found [the Academy] to be the hiding place of many of those speculators implicated in the South Sea Bubble. Not only is Swift satirizing the role of the projector in contemporary English politics, which he dabbled in during his younger years, but the role of the satirist, whose goals align with that of a projector: "The less obvious corollary of that word [projector] is that it must include the poor deluded satirist himself, since satire is, in its very essence, the wildest of all projects - a scheme to reform the world.
Ann Kelly describes Part IV of The Travels and the Yahoo-Houyhnhnm relationship as an allusion to that of the Irish and the British: "The term that Swift uses to describe the oppression in both Ireland and Houyhnhnmland is 'slavery'; this is not an accidental word choice, for Swift was well aware of the complicated moral and philosophical questions raised by the emotional designation 'slavery. Although no one has done so, similar questions could be asked about the Yahoos, who are slaves to the Houyhnhnms. The book was very popular upon release and was commonly discussed within social circles.
It became known for its insightful take on morality, expanding its reputation beyond just humorous satire. Despite its initial positive reception, the book faced backlash. One of the first critics of the book, referred to as Lord Bolingbroke, criticized Swift for his overt use of misanthropy. Readers enjoyed the political references, finding them humorous. However, members of the Whig party were offended, believing that Swift mocked their politics.
British novelist and journalist William Makepeace Thackeray described Swift's work as "blasphemous", citing its critical view of mankind as ludicrous and overly harsh. The term Lilliputian has entered many languages as an adjective meaning "small and delicate". There is a brand of small cigar called Lilliput, and a series of collectable model houses known as "Lilliput Lane". The smallest light bulb fitting 5 mm diameter in the Edison screw series is called the "Lilliput Edison screw". Conversely, Brobdingnagian appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as a synonym for very large or gigantic. In like vein, the term yahoo is often encountered as a synonym for ruffian or thug. In the Oxford English Dictionary it is defined as "a rude, noisy, or violent person" and its origins attributed to Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
In the discipline of computer architecture , the terms big-endian and little-endian are used to describe two possible ways of laying out bytes in memory. The terms derive from one of the satirical conflicts in the book, in which two religious sects of Lilliputians are divided between those who crack open their soft-boiled eggs from the little end, the "Little-endians", and those who use the big end, the "Big-endians". Many sequels followed the initial publishing of the Travels. The earliest of these was the anonymously authored Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput , [26] published , which expands the account of Gulliver's stays in Lilliput and Blefuscu by adding several gossipy anecdotes about scandalous episodes at the Lilliputian court. The standard edition of Jonathan Swift's prose works as of [update] is the Prose Writings in 16 volumes, edited by Herbert Davis et al.
See also: Logic machines in fiction and List of fictional computers. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Gulliver's Travels disambiguation. Dewey Decimal. See also: Floating cities and islands in fiction. Main article: Cultural influence of Gulliver's Travels. DeMaria, Robert J ed. Gulliver's Travels. Rawson, Claude ed. ISBN Communion Arts Journal. Retrieved 9 January Retrieved 17 August Four Essays on Gulliver's Travels. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Isaac Asimov ed. The Annotated Gulliver's Travels. New York: Simon and Schuster. Gulliver's travels : complete, authoritative text with biographical and historical contexts, critical history, and essays from five contemporary critical perspectives.
Fox, Christopher. OCLC Texas Studies in Literature and Language. JSTOR S2CID Foster, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, , pp. Larry Champion. Athens: U of Georgia Press, Modern Philology. ISSN Readings on Gulliver's Travels , Greenhaven Press, , pp. University of Windsor , Routledge, Oxford Dictionaries. La veuve Clouzier. Rawson, Claude; Higgins, Ian eds. Gulliver's Travels New ed. Jonathan Swift 's Gulliver's Travels Lemuel Gulliver Glumdalclitch. The Engine Houyhnhnm Struldbrugg Yahoo. Cultural influence of Gulliver's Travels.
Jonathan Swift. Sermons of Jonathan Swift. Fantasy fiction. History Literature Magic Sources. Anime Films Television programs. It is the medium of the present, of enjoyment and gaiety; moreover it is attended with no exertion. With thinking the opposite is the case: it is the second power of knowledge, the exercise of which always demands some, and often considerable exertion. Besides, it is the conceptions of thought that often oppose the gratification of our immediate desires, for, as the medium of the past, the future, and of seriousness, they are the vehicles of our fears, our repentance, and all our cares.
It must therefore be diverting to us to see this strict, untiring, troublesome governess, the reason, for once convicted of insufficiency. On this account then the mien or appearance of laughter is very closely related to that of joy Supplement to Book I, Ch. Irony marks the boundary between the aesthetic and the ethical spheres, while humor marks the boundary between the ethical and religious spheres. The person with a religious view of life is likely to cultivate humor, he says, and Christianity is the most humorous view of life in world history [JP], Entries — There was another here recently whom I had to send away without giving anything, too: we cannot give to everybody.
The violation of our expectations is at the heart of the tragic as well as the comic, Kierkegaard says. The tragic and the comic are the same, in so far as both are based on contradiction; but the tragic is the suffering contradiction, the comical, the painless contradiction…. The comic apprehension evokes the contradiction or makes it manifest by having in mind the way out, which is why the contradiction is painless. The tragic apprehension sees the contradiction and despairs of a way out. Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps: for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
We weep at what thwarts or exceeds our desires in serious matters; we laugh at what only disappoints our expectations in trifles…. To explain the nature of laughter and tears, is to account for the condition of human life; for it is in a manner compounded of the two! It is a tragedy or a comedy—sad or merry, as it happens…. Tears may be considered as the natural and involuntary resource of the mind overcome by some sudden and violent emotion, before it has had time to reconcile its feelings to the change of circumstances: while laughter may be defined to be the same sort of convulsive and involuntary movement, occasioned by mere surprise or contrast in the absence of any more serious emotion , before it has time to reconcile its belief to contrary appearances Hazlitt [], 1.
If we are listening to a joke for the second time, of course, there is a sense in which we expect the incongruous punch line, but it still violates our ordinary expectations. Beyond that core meaning, various thinkers have added different details, many of which are incompatible with each other. In contemporary psychology, for example, theorists such as Thomas Schultz and Jerry Suls , have claimed that what we enjoy in humor is not incongruity itself, but the resolution of incongruity. After age seven, Schultz says, we require the fitting of the apparently anomalous element into some conceptual schema. Amusement, according to this understanding of humor, is akin to puzzle-solving.
Other theorists insist that incongruity-resolution figures in only some humor, and that the pleasure of amusement is not like puzzle-solving. As philosophers and psychologists refined the Incongruity Theory in the late 20 th century, one flaw in several older versions came to light: they said, or more often implied, that the perception of incongruity is sufficient for humor. That is clearly false, since when our mental patterns and expectations are violated, we may well feel fear, disgust, or anger and not amusement. James Beattie, the first philosopher to analyze humor as a response to incongruity, was careful to point out that laughter is only one such response. One way to correct this flaw is to say that humorous amusement is not just any response to incongruity, but a way of enjoying incongruity.
Michael Clark, for example, offers these three features as necessary and sufficient for humor:. This version of the Incongruity Theory is an improvement on theories which describe amusement as the perception of incongruity, but it still seems not specific enough. Amusement is one way of enjoying incongruity, but not the only way. Mike W. Martin offers several examples from the arts in Morreall, , We in the audience, knowing that Oedipus is himself that killer, may enjoy the incongruity of a king threatening himself, but that enjoyment need not be humorous amusement.
John Morreall , — argues that a number of aesthetic categories— the grotesque, the macabre, the horrible, the bizarre, and the fantastic—involve a non-humorous enjoyment of some violation of our mental patterns and expectations. Whatever refinements the Incongruity Theory might require, it seems better able to account for laughter and humor than the scientifically obsolete Relief Theory. It also seems more comprehensive than the Superiority Theory since it can account for kinds of humor that do not seem based on superiority, such as puns and other wordplay. Part of the continued bad reputation of humor comes from a new objection triggered by the Incongruity Theory: If humor is enjoying the violation of our mental patterns and expectations, then it is irrational.
According to Kant, humor feels good in spite of, not because of, the way it frustrates our desire to understand. George Santayana , agreed, arguing that incongruity itself could not be enjoyed. We have a prosaic background of common sense and everyday reality; upon this background an unexpected idea suddenly impinges. But the thing is a futility. The comic accident falsifies the nature before us, starts a wrong analogy in the mind, a suggestion that cannot be carried out. In a word, we are in the presence of an absurdity, and man, being a rational animal, can like absurdity no better than he can like hunger or cold. If the widespread contemporary appreciation of humor is defensible, then this Irrationality Objection needs to be addressed.
To do that seems to require an explanation of how our higher mental functions can operate in a beneficial way that is different from theoretical and practical reasoning. One way to construct that explanation is to analyze humor as a kind of play, and explain how such play can be beneficial. Remarkably few philosophers have even mentioned that humor is a kind of play, much less seen benefits in such play. One of the few to classify humor as play and see value in the mental side of humor was Thomas Aquinas. He followed the lead of Aristotle, who said in the Nicomachean Ethics Ch.
As bodily tiredness is eased by resting the body, so psychological tiredness is eased by resting the soul. As we have explained in discussing the feelings, pleasure is rest for the soul. And therefore the remedy for weariness of soul lies in slackening the tension of mental study and taking some pleasure…. Beyond providing rest for the soul, Aquinas suggests that humor has social benefits. Anything conflicting with reason in human action is vicious. It is against reason for a man to be burdensome to others, by never showing himself agreeable to others or being a kill-joy or wet blanket on their enjoyment. In the last century an early play theory of humor was developed by Max Eastman , who found parallels to humor in the play of animals, particularly in the laughter of chimps during tickling.
In humor and play generally, according to Eastman, we take a disinterested attitude toward something that could instead be treated seriously. It can serve as a social lubricant, engendering trust and reducing conflict. In communications that tend to evoke negative emotions--announcing bad news, apologizing, complaining, warning, criticizing, commanding, evaluating--humor can provide delight that reduces or even blocks negative emotions. Consider this paragraph from a debt-collection letter:.
We appreciate your business, but, please, give us a break. Your account is overdue ten months. Play activities such as humor are not usually pursued in order to achieve such benefits, of course; they are pursued, as Aquinas said, for pleasure. A parallel with humor here is music, which we typically play and listen to for pleasure, but which can boost our manual dexterity and even mathematical abilities, reduce stress, and strengthen our social bonds. Ethologists students of animal, including human, behavior point out that in play activities, young animals learn important skills they will need later on. Young lions, for example, play by going through actions that will be part of hunting.
Humans have hunted with rocks and spears for tens of thousands of years, and so boys often play by throwing projectiles at targets. Marek Spinka observes that in playing, young animals move in exaggerated ways. Young monkeys leap not just from branch to branch, but from trees into rivers. Children not only run, but skip and do cartwheels. Spinka suggests that in play young animals are testing the limits of their speed, balance, and coordination. In doing so, they learn to cope with unexpected situations such as being chased by a new kind of predator. This account of the value of play in children and young animals does not automatically explain why humor is important to adult humans, but for us as for children and young animals, the play activities that seem the most fun are those in which we exercise our abilities in unusual and extreme ways, yet in a safe setting.
Sports is an example. So is humor. In humor the abilities we exercise in unusual and extreme ways in a safe setting are related to thinking and interacting with other people. What is enjoyed is incongruity, the violation of our mental patterns and expectations. In joking with friends, for example, we break rules of conversation such as these formulated by H. Grice :. Rule 3 is broken to create humor when we reply to an embarrassing question with an obviously vague or confusing answer.
We violate Rule 4 in telling most prepared jokes, as Victor Raskin has shown. A comment or story starts off with an assumed interpretation for a phrase, but then at the punch line, switches to a second, usually opposed interpretation. They taste a lot like chicken. Humor, like other play, sometimes takes the form of activity that would not be mistaken for serious activity. Wearing a red clown nose and making up nonsense syllables are examples.
More often, however, as in the conversational moves above, humor and play are modeled on serious activities. When in conversation we switch from serious discussion to making funny comments, for example, we keep the same vocabulary and grammar, and our sentences transcribed to paper might look like bona-fide assertions, questions, etc. This similarity between non-serious and serious language and actions calls for ways that participants can distinguish between the two.
The oldest play signals in humans are smiling and laughing. According to ethologists, these evolved from similar play signals in pre-human apes. The apes that evolved into Homo sapiens split off from the apes that evolved into chimpanzees and gorillas about six million years ago. In chimps and gorillas, as in other mammals, play usually takes the form of mock-aggression such as chasing, wrestling, biting, and tickling. According to many ethologists, mock-aggression was the earliest form of play, from which all other play developed Aldis , ; Panksepp , In mock-aggressive play, it is critical that all participants are aware that the activity is not real aggression.
Without a way to distinguish between being chased or bitten playfully and being attacked in earnest, an animal might respond with deadly force. In the anthropoid apes, play signals are visual and auditory. Jan van Hooff , — and others speculate that the first play signals in humans evolved from two facial displays in an ancestor of both humans and the great apes that are still found in gorillas and chimps. In the other facial display, the lips are relaxed and the mouth open, and breathing is shallow and staccato, like panting. The relaxed mouth in laughter contrasts with the mouth in real aggression that is tense and prepared to bite hard.
As early hominin species began walking upright and the front limbs were no longer used for locomotion, the muscles in the chest no longer had to synchronize breathing with locomotion. The larynx moved to a lower position in the throat, and the pharynx developed, allowing early humans to modulate their breathing and vocalize in complex ways Harris , In the competition for women to mate with, early men may have engaged in humor to show their intelligence, cleverness, adaptability, and desire to please others. The hypothesis that laughter evolved as a play signal is appealing in several ways. Unlike the Superiority and Incongruity Theories, it explains the link between humor and the facial expression, body language, and sound of laughter.
It also explains why laughter is overwhelmingly a social experience, as those theories do not. According to one estimate, we are thirty times more likely to laugh with other people than when we are alone Provine , Tracing laughter to a play signal in early humans also accords with the fact that young children today laugh during the same activities—chasing, wrestling, and tickling—in which chimps and gorillas show their play face and laugh-like vocalizations. The idea that laughter and humor evolved from mock-aggression, furthermore, helps explain why so much humor today, especially in males, is playfully aggressive. The playful aggression found in much humor has been widely misunderstood by philosophers, especially in discussions of the ethics of humor.
Starting with Plato, most philosophers have treated humor that represents people in a negative light as if it were real aggression toward those people. Jokes in which blondes or Poles are extraordinarily stupid, blacks extraordinarily lazy, Italians extraordinarily cowardly, lawyers extraordinarily self-centered, women extraordinarily unmathematical, etc. Philips classifies Polish jokes as racist, for example, but anyone who understands their popularity in the s, knows that they did not involve hostility toward Polish people, who had long been assimilated into North American society. Consider the joke about the Polish astronaut calling a press conference to announce that he was going to fly a rocket to the sun.
This is a fantasy enjoyed for its clever depiction of unbelievable stupidity. While playing with negative stereotypes in jokes does not require endorsement of those stereotypes, however, it still keeps them in circulation, and that can be harmful in a racist or sexist culture where stereotypes support prejudice and injustice. Jokes can be morally objectionable for perpetuating stereotypes that need to be eliminated. More generally, humor can be morally objectionable when it treats as a subject for play something that should be taken seriously. Morreall , ch. Here humor often blocks compassion and responsible action. From it they produced the record album Concert for Bangladesh. The album cover featured a photograph of a starving child with a begging bowl.
Having sketched an account of humor as play with words and ideas, we need to go further in order to counter the Irrationality Objection, especially since that play is based on violating mental patterns and expectations. What must be added is an explanation of how playfully violating mental patterns and expectations could foster rationality rather than undermine it. Or I could think about embarrassing moments like this as experienced by millions of people over the centuries.
More abstract still would be to think, as the Buddha did, about how human life is full of problems. In the lower animals, mental processing is not abstract but tied to present experience, needs, and opportunities. It is about nearby predators, food, mates, etc. When something violates their expectations, especially something involving a potential or actual loss, their typical reaction is fear, anger, disgust, or sadness. These emotions evolved in mammals and were useful for millions of years because they motivate adaptive behavior such as fighting, fleeing, avoiding noxious substances, withdrawing from activity, and avoiding similar situations in the future. Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness are still sometimes adaptive in humans: A snarling dog scares us, for example, and we move away quickly, avoiding a nasty bite.
We scream and poke the eyes of a mugger, and he runs off. What early humans needed was a way to react to the violation of their expectations that transcended their immediate experience and their individual perspective. Humorous amusement provided that. In the humorous frame of mind, we experience, think about, or even create something that violates our understanding of how things are supposed to be. But we suspend the personal, practical concerns that lead to negative emotions, and enjoy the oddness of what is occurring.
If the incongruous situation is our own failure or mistake, we view it in the way we view the failures and mistakes of other people. This perspective is more abstract, objective, and rational than an emotional perspective. In laughter, as Wallace Chafe said in The Importance of Not Being Earnest , not only do we not do anything, but we are disabled as we lose muscle control in our torsos, arms, and legs. In extremely heavy laughter, we fall on the floor and wet our pants.
The nonpractical attitude in humor would not be beneficial, of course, if I were in imminent danger. When immediate action is called for, humor is no substitute. But in many situations where our expectations are violated, no action would help. One of us has to go. In fear and anger, chemicals such as epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol are released into the blood, causing an increase in muscle tension, heart rate, and blood pressure, and a suppression of the immune system.
Those physiological changes evolved in earlier mammals as a way to energize them to fight or flee, and in early humans, they were usually responses to physical dangers such as predators or enemies. Today, however, our bodies and brains react in the same way to problems that are not physically threatening, such as overbearing bosses and work deadlines. The increased muscle tension, the spike in blood pressure, and other changes in stress not only do not help us with such problems, but cause new ones such as headaches, heart attacks, and cancer. When in potentially stressful situations we shift to the play mode of humor, our heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension decrease, as do levels of epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol.
Laughter also increases pain tolerance and boosts the activity of the immune system, which stress suppresses Morreall , ch. It frees us from vanity, on the one hand, and from pessimism, on the other, by keeping us larger than what we do, and greater than what can happen to us. While there is only speculation about how humor developed in early humans, we know that by the late 6 th century BCE the Greeks had institutionalized it in the ritual known as comedy, and that it was performed with a contrasting dramatic form known as tragedy.
Both were based on the violation of mental patterns and expectations, and in both the world is a tangle of conflicting systems where humans live in the shadow of failure, folly, and death. Like tragedy, comedy represents life as full of tension, danger, and struggle, with success or failure often depending on chance factors. Identifying with these characters, audiences at comedies and tragedies have contrasting responses to events in the dramas. And because these responses carry over to similar situations in life, comedy and tragedy embody contrasting responses to the incongruities in life. Along with epic, it is part of the Western heroic tradition that extols ideals, the willingness to fight for them, and honor.
The tragic ethos is linked to patriarchy and militarism—many of its heroes are kings and conquerors—and it valorizes what Conrad Hyers calls Warrior Virtues—blind obedience, the willingness to kill or die on command, unquestioning loyalty, single-mindedness, resoluteness of purpose, and pride. Its own methods of handling conflict include deal-making, trickery, getting an enemy drunk, and running away.
In place of Warrior Virtues, it extols critical thinking, cleverness, adaptability, and an appreciation of physical pleasures like eating, drinking, and sex. Along with the idealism of tragedy goes elitism. The people who matter are kings, queens, and generals. In comedy there are more characters and more kinds of characters, women are more prominent, and many protagonists come from lower classes. Everybody counts for one. That shows in the language of comedy, which, unlike the elevated language of tragedy, is common speech. The basic unit in tragedy is the individual, in comedy it is the family, group of friends, or bunch of co-workers.
While tragic heroes are emotionally engaged with their problems, comic protagonists show emotional disengagement. They think, rather than feel, their way through difficulties. By presenting such characters as role models, comedy has implicitly valorized the benefits of humor that are now being empirically verified, such as that it is psychologically and physically healthy, it fosters mental flexibility, and it serves as a social lubricant. With a few exceptions like Aquinas, philosophers have ignored these benefits. If philosophers wanted to undo the traditional prejudices against humor, they might consider the affinities between one contemporary genre of comedy—standup comedy—and philosophy itself.
There are at least seven. First, standup comedy and philosophy are conversational: like the dialogue format that started with Plato, standup routines are interactive. Second, both reflect on familiar experiences, especially puzzling ones. We wake from a vivid dream, for example, not sure what has happened and what is happening. Third, like philosophers, standup comics often approach puzzling experiences with questions. They ask whether familiar ideas make sense, and they refuse to defer to authority and tradition. It was for his critical thinking that Socrates was executed.
So were cabaret comics in Germany who mocked the Third Reich. Sixth, in thinking critically, philosophers and standup comics pay careful attention to language. Attacking sloppy and illogical uses of words is standard in both, and so is finding exactly the right words to express an idea. Seventh, the pleasure of standup comedy is often like the pleasure of doing philosophy. In both we relish new ways of looking at things and delight in surprising thoughts. Cleverness is prized. One recent philosopher attuned to the affinity between comedy and philosophy was Bertrand Russell.
Often writing for popular audiences, Russell had many quips that would fit nicely into a comedy routine:. For more examples of the affinities between comedy and philosophy, there is a series of books on philosophy and popular culture from Open Court Publishing that includes: Seinfeld and Philosophy , The Simpsons and Philosophy , Woody Allen and Philosophy , and Monty Python and Philosophy In philosophy of mind, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams have used humor to explain the development of the human mind.
The journals Philosophy East and West , the Monist , and Educational Philosophy and Theory have published special issues on humor. The ancient prejudices against humor that started with Plato are finally starting to crumble. The Superiority Theory 3. The Relief Theory 4. The Incongruity Theory 5. Humor as Play, Laughter as Play Signal 6. The only way God is described as laughing in the Bible is with hostility: The kings of the earth stand ready, and the rulers conspire together against the Lord and his anointed king….
John Chrysostom, for example, warned that Laughter often gives birth to foul discourse, and foul discourse to actions still more foul. The Superiority Theory With these comments of Hobbes and Descartes, we have a sketchy psychological theory articulating the view of laughter that started in Plato and the Bible and dominated Western thinking about laughter for two millennia. The Relief Theory Further weakening the dominance of the Superiority Theory in the 18 th century were two new accounts of laughter which are now called the Relief Theory and the Incongruity Theory.
The Incongruity Theory The second account of humor that arose in the 18 th century to challenge the Superiority Theory was the Incongruity Theory. Kant illustrates with this story: An Indian at the table of an Englishman in Surat, when he saw a bottle of ale opened and all the beer turned into froth and overflowing, testified his great astonishment with many exclamations. With his theory, too, Schopenhauer explains the pleasure of humor. Michael Clark, for example, offers these three features as necessary and sufficient for humor: A person perceives thinks, imagines an object as being incongruous.
The person enjoys perceiving thinking, imagining the object. The person enjoys the perceived thought, imagined incongruity at least partly for itself, rather than solely for some ulterior reason in Morreall , — Consider this paragraph from a debt-collection letter: We appreciate your business, but, please, give us a break. Grice : Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief. Comedy While there is only speculation about how humor developed in early humans, we know that by the late 6 th century BCE the Greeks had institutionalized it in the ritual known as comedy, and that it was performed with a contrasting dramatic form known as tragedy. Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told.
Bibliography Adkin, N. Aldis, O. Andrew, R. Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae , trans. Thomas Gilby, London: Blackfriars, Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle , ed. Beattie, J. Bergson, H. Brereton and F. Rothwell trs. Bressler, E. Martin, and S. Carroll, N. Levinson ed. Cathcart, T. Chafe, W. Sutton and H. Rackham trans. Clark, M. Clewis, R. Cochrane, T. Cohen, T. Critchley, S. Deckers, L. Descartes, R.
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