The Morality of Laughter

Notes

Notes Preface 1. Roger Kimball, “‘The Two Cultures’ Today,” in Roger Kimball, ed., Against the Grain (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), 391, 392. For a balanced view of the dispute, see Lionel Trilling, “The Leavis-Snow Controversy,” in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000), 402. 2. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 160. 3. Roy Bhaskar, Plato etc: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (London : Verso, 1994). Chapter 1. Laughter as Superiority 1. Sigmund Freud, “Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious,” in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 599, 673, 620. 2. J. Y. T. Greig, The Psychology of Laughter and Comedy (New York: Cooper Square, 1923), 100–105. 3. Lawrence La Fave, Jay Haddad, and William A. Maesen, “Superiority, Enhanced Self-Esteem, and Perceived Incongruity Humor Theory,” in Antony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot, eds., Humor and Laughter: Theory, Research, and Applications (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1996), 63. 4. Poetics 5.1449a. There is a more extensive discussion of tragedy than comedy in the Poetics, which gave rise to the tradition of a lost second book on comedy—the subject of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. A later fragment on comedy in the Tractatus Coisilianus appears to derive from Aristotle, though its author is unknown. See Lane Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922). For an attempt to ›esh out an Aristotelian theory of comedy, see Richard Janko, Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Aristotle, Poetics (Richard Janko, ed.) (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). 5. Descartes’s physical laughter is a joy mingled with hate in which we note some small fault in another. By contrast, his intellectual laughter—“modest raillery”—is a virtuous gaiety that usefully condemns vices by making them appear ridiculous. In both cases, laughter signals a butt’s inferiority. See Susan James, Passion and Action (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998); Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 72–73. 6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1968 [1651]), 161. 7. Thomas Hobbes, “Human Nature,” in Human Nature and De Corpore Politico (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 [1640]), 48. 201 8. Hobbes, Leviathan, 125. 9. Tertullian, “Of Spectacles,” in I Translations of the Writings of the Fathers: The Writings of Tertullian (Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds.) (Edinburgh : Clark, 1869), 8–35. See also St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa III Supp. Q. 94, art. 1. 10. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London: Oxford University Press, 1907 [1818]), 7. 11. Henri Bergson, Le rire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1940 [1900]). 12. Samuel Johnson, The Critical Opinions of Samuel Johnson (New York: Russell and Russell, 1953), 491. 13. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 223. 14. “Son crime est plutôt une punition des dieux qu’un movement de sa volonté.” Racine, Phèdre (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1985), Préface, 13. On Jansenism’s righteous sinner, see Leszek Kolakowski, God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 9–14. “Jésus-Christ est venu . . . justi‹er les pécheures et laisser les justes dans leurs péchés.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées 220, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 2000), 2:623. 15. George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996 [1961]), 8. 16. The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (Donat Gallagher, ed.) (London: Methuen, 1983), 304. 17. Elizabeth Longford, Wellington: Pillar of State (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 77. 18. I take up the question again in chapter 9. For an overview of the debate, see John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). For contrary views, see Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Little, Brown, 1991), and (less provocatively) Owen Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). 19. See John Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness (New York: New York Review, 1997), xiv. Chapter 2. The Elements of Laughter 1. Animal laughter, said Beattie, “arises, not from any sentiment, or perception of ludicrous ideas, but from some bodily feeling, or sudden impulse, on what is called the animal spirits, proceeding, or seeming to proceed, from the operation of causes purely material.” James Beattie, “On Laughter and Ludicrous...