Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (review)

Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters. Ted Cohen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. 99. $15.00.

The end of Ted Cohen's book takes up the question of what to do about cruel and disgusting jokes, especially racist ones. Given that Cohen has gone so far as to register a "sacred twinge" in jokes, it seems rather late in the story to find some of them disgusting (that is, not even attaining the dignity, the sacredness, of evil) (59). In fact, Cohen does not seem to have his heart in this afterthought, which seems to exist as an act of responsibility on the part of a philosopher who mainly wants us to love jokes the way that he does and cannot, in good conscience, appear not to notice that it is hard to love jokes that are polluting to hear. Though this would seem to be the controversial part of the book, I do not see the virtue of arguing with Cohen on the point of morality; if one has read the prior chapters with sympathy, the tardy defense of jokes against the charge of immorality is superfluous. One has been invited to feel only gratitude for the existence of jokes, which according to Cohen exist for the sake of freedom and intimacy.

Freedom from what? The most general answer is: from anything that feels coercive. Death, first of all. Not, of course, that we annihilate or contain death by joking about it, rather that for a moment we arrange to feel not routed by it. To get the balance right, Cohen declares that "one, jokes cannot be the entire human response to death, or to anything else; two, any total response to death that does not include the possibility of jokes is less than a totally human response" (70). This is because the place of "humanity"--the location that defines its essential nature--is the threshold of understanding and ignorance. Jokes look two ways, toward knowledge and toward absurdity; jokes thus can acknowledge death but will assign to absurdity what in death cannot be mastered rationally.

It is from their centrality to the humanity of humans that jokes acquire for Cohen the sacred twinge: jokes allow people to face God, both full of their own logic (they can make God laugh, according to a Talmudic anecdote, when their cheeky logic convinces Him) and aware of its limitations before such divine demands as the sacrifice of Isaac. Much of one's response to this part of the book depends on whether one cares about such concepts as God or humanity. I only want to note that the argument--that jokes confront what is coercive and absurd in human life--is odd, insofar as jokes are themselves coercive (as Cohen grants) and create absurdities as much as they confront them (as Cohen knows). On the level of what jokes mean, I think that Cohen's book is not untrue but one-sided. Every so often, Cohen alludes to the occasions when jokes allow a truth to appear; he only gets to their lies towards the end. But there is a good reason that he seems happier with the sacred aspect of joking than with the profane.

The reason is that Cohen only speculates about what jokes mean by way of manifesting what jokes do. The book devotes as much space to telling jokes as to analyzing them, and an appreciation of the sources of Cohen's jokes--friends, colleagues, family--runs through the text and footnotes. This might seem smug except that it has a purpose: to recreate before our eyes, as if artlessly, the community that Cohen claims it is the purpose of jokes to form. Jokes are sacred not so much because they are about death or the absurd as because they create an intimate community, a sacred circle of joke initiates. And in fact to read this book with sympathy is to want to tell Cohen one's favorite joke and...