Comedy and Theory
Tim Green from Bradford, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Humor and logic have a peculiar relationship.
You could, and many have, try to construct a theory of the joke. Categories of humor. Psychologization of semantic signifiers. You could dish up the parlance any number of which ways you choose, in the style of your analytical toolkit of choice.
But no theory can comprehensively capture what is at the heart of humor. The funny eludes the theoretician's grasp.
There is no quicker way to dispel a particular joke's power than to explain it. There is a reduction involved in rendering the implicit construction of a joke's inner workings explicit. A near spiritual loss analogous to a corpse being the soul-departed body.
It is Eurydicean or perhaps like a white stag, in sight but always vanishing upon the point of attaining it.
The perishing of the individual joke's funny when pierced by the spear of the explainer in turn safeguards the mystique of the funny in general.
What is funny will always circumvent the snares of totalistic logic. Puck will always have his fun.
The same cannot be said of the reverse.
Philosophical systems labored over for centuries. Edifices elaborated over millennia may appear daunting, impregnable fortresses from the standpoint of logic. Who can assail the transcendental deduction?
Humor is an astonishingly potent antigen to the pretenses of human reason.
A joke can casually lay waste to a philosophical argument. A caricature can undermine the force of a system. It is not uncommon to see a long-winded presentation of theory and words and ideas conclude, only to be detonated by a precise and fine-tuned witticism. All such legwork undone to pieces.
It is a powerful instrument of great use in the recent decades when philosophical discourse has devolved into the circulation of heavy theory and formulations and abstractions two degrees of simulacra removed from the things they ostensibly describe. The flying island of Laputa.
To bring obscure positions down to earth in practical humor that disenchants obscurantist rhetoric and presents absurd conclusions or justifications that can be drawn from these theories.
This is of course humor in a particular and qualified sense. Not all attempts at funny can realize this form of anti-philosophical potency effectively, unless it is demagoguery to fuel anti-intellectualism through superficial caricature.
Like Joseph Addison's distinction in Spectator No. 62 between true wit which deals with ideas and false wit which deals only with words. There is a kind of humor that does the word play or the semblance bit and can have its entertainment value but does not quite get at the essence of the thing. And yet there are executions of humor that truly capture heart-and-soul what it is going after.
That is why we can say there is a sharpness to humor. In a small economy of words, perhaps a mere phrase, it can pop the whole balloon with fine precision.
It is a corrective for those who think too highly of themselves and their views. For those who believe that theory can be comprehensive or more powerful than it should. Plato and Kierkegaard understood this far too well.
Yet it can be dangerous when it becomes rancorous. Pure negativity and cynicism. Things exist only to be subverted or made fun of. The sitcom mindset that unfortuantely has come to define the spirit of the millennial generation.
Again, perhaps why Joseph Addison gave a moral direction to wit. It must be attuned to an ultimately positive direction. The scalpel should not be employed to dessicate the entire body. It plays its part then other tools come into play.
Or, as Wittgenstein observed, that a serious and good philosophical work could be written out of a well-constructed jokebook.