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  • Isn't That Clever: A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy by Steven Gimbel
  • Michael Dalebout (bio)
Isn't That Clever: A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy. By Steven Gimbel. New York: Routledge, 2017. 208 pp.

Steven Gimbel's Isn't That Clever: A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy attempts to wrangle the vast breadth of concerns that humor scholars and comedy audiences muse over—including definitions of humor and comedy, performance genres and styles, and theories of joke work, comedic ethics, and intellectual property. He frequently succeeds in bundling together and linking up these concerns, producing a number of expansive taxonomies and categorizations that are, for anyone who wants to begin an analysis of what's so funny about something, easy to reference. Nearly every chapter has something to offer: chapter 1 recapitulates the major theories of humor, comedy, and laughter since the Greeks (and grounds Gimbel's cleverness theory, which is introduced in chapter 2); chapter 3 digs into verbal humor, specifically jokes, and makes fine distinctions between their types and similar speech acts; chapter 4 covers techniques, effects, and genres of comedy; chapter 5 offers aesthetic vices and virtues of a gag; and chapters 6 and 7 provide a compendium of ethical stances toward and constraints on humor. It's a lot to tackle, but Gimbel gets it done in a tidy, well-organized 185 pages.

The book's guiding thread is its theoretical suggestion—or provocation—that humor is to be understood as "a conspicuous display of playful cleverness" executed by an intentional actor (5). While mirth or laughter are often what is intended, Gimbel is keen to point out that many of the reasons we engage in humor aren't all that funny. Against response-side theorizations of comedy that argue that an audience makes a joke a joke when it laughs, he argues in chapter 2 that any determination of whether or not an act is humorous ought to begin on the stimulus side, with, for example, a humorist or comedian. There are four key aspects in this determination: whether the gag is intended (even if it's not very good), conspicuous (meant to be seen even if it's not overt), playful (or irreverent toward everyday designs), and clever. The fourth, cleverness, featured in the title [End Page 247] and the one that gives Gimbel's theory its name, is "the most important" (43): the gag must show a cognitive virtue, a category for which Gimbel has a list of traits, including attention to detail, open mindedness, and the ability to find errors in one's belief structure. Throughout the text, his analysis of what makes humor humor, comedy comedy, a gag a gag, or a joke a joke is pointed toward its source (e.g., a comedian, a comic strip, etc.). Thus, while for Gimbel audience is necessary and helpful in determining the quality of a humor act of any flavor, he is explicit that the audience cannot adjudicate whether or not it was a humorous act. In this account, the joker makes the joke a joke and is responsible for all the creative, performative, and ethical risks involved.

The unfortunate weakness of Gimbel's valiant effort to discipline a wily two-millennia-long conversation emerges at the juncture of stimulus- and response-side engagement. Gimbel acknowledges, of course, that "joking is a cooperative activity" (66). But only when facing hecklers and joke theft in chapter 8 is he ready to consider serious philosophical questions about how humor is formed and to whom it belongs. Refusing the idea that a listener can make something "a joke by fiat," Gimbel maintains that the stimulus or joker "conveys the act with the status of being humorous or not and thereby determines how the audience ought to regard it" (36). This starting point keeps him from seriously engaging with certain substantive theorizations of the phenomena of humor within the field and many ethical concerns that comedy audiences have in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Some of Gimbel's language suggests that he is being intentionally provocative, especially when he disregards theories and thinkers who acknowledge their emphasis has...

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