Humor

Humor is a marvelous subject for philosophers of art. The breadth of the subject is enormous. Humor is to be found in canonical works of art: plays, movies, stories, novels, paintings, operas and so forth. And it is found in contexts not typically associated with art: jokes, wit in ordinary conversation, and even in events to be witnessed in the world, like umbrellas blowing inside-out, dogs chasing their tails, or a baby grabbing the nose of an intrusive adult. There are forms of humor – wit, most conspicuously – in which a premium attaches

to the speed with which the humor is produced. As an example consider an achievement of Oscar Wilde reported by Professor Nicholas Rudall. In this story Wilde was a guest at a dinner party and another guest volunteered the claim that Wilde could produce a witticism on any subject whatever. Another guest took the challenge and offered as a subject “Queen Victoria.”Wilde immediately responded, “Queen Victoria is not a subject.” Whether this story is accurate or apocryphal, it serves as an illustration. However

much one may admire the cleverness of Wilde’s response, the admiration clearly seems significantly increased when one considers that Wilde produced the remark immediately, on the spot. Perhaps one imagines that one could oneself have made this response given enough time to work on it, say a week or so. In this regard, the celebration of spontaneous and quick humor, the appreciation of wit has some resemblance to the appreciation of artistic improvisation in general, and perhaps particularly in the case of jazz. A member of an improvising jazz group responds to another member who has just played an improvised solo and now the new member, on the spot, produces a solo that both recalls the original theme and acknowledges the improvisation just heard. It is likely that all the music played be notated and then the entire sequence played from a score, but there seems no doubt that there is a special appreciation of the music created, as it were, on the spot and without any aid. So it may be with displays of wit. Thus humor is found both in and outside art, in both fictional and real contexts.

This suggests, what is almost certainly true, that there can be no general, overarching “theory” of humor, unless the theory is so general and probably vague as to be utterly uninformative. The idea that there could be no perfectly general theory of humor, one that identified its causes and its character, is at least as old as Cicero and Quintilian, and is held by some contemporary authors including the author of this

chapter. But there have been such general theories at least since the seventeenth century, and they can be found described in the excellent encyclopedia entries listed in this chapter’s bibliography, but they will be discussed only briefly in this chapter. Instead, this chapter will suggest a more general theory, but also say why neither this theory nor any other is likely to be definitive. Eighteenth-century philosophers were accustomed to thinking of some human

capacity as a “sense of beauty,” by which they meant a capacity to be affected by beauty. Although that way of thinking has lapsed, along with thoughts of a “sense of morality” or “sense of virtue,” it is still common to speak of a “sense of humor,” presumably meaning by that a capacity to be affected by humorous things; and this is not a bad way to begin thinking about humor. For instance, one might start with an innocuous formulation like this: