We’ve spent
a lot of time talking in class about humor being humorous because it highlights
absurdities. The theorists and stories that we had to read all link together to
illustrate a spectrum of absurdity: ranging from general strange things and
ironies to, on a more serious note, highlighting absurdities of the human
condition and injustice.
As a humor
theorist, Kant described humor as absurdities that “change representations in judgment”
on a basic level: what you expect isn’t what you get at the end of the story. Both
of Woody Allen’s stories, in addition to Mark Twain’s Jim Blaine story are
humorous for this reason. Death being a literal human who apparently should be
taller, to thinking a story is about prostitutes when instead it’s about paying
for intellectual conversations, to a story where you think you’re finding out
about a bull, but you never do because the man’s too drunk to tell the story:
these are all humorous stories because of the change in judgment, our
preconceived notions are shaken up by the absurdities of the story and we have
no other choice but to laugh.
Humor
theorist Kierkegaard takes the absurdity spectrum a step further, saying that
humor isn’t only about life’s absurdities and a change in judgment but rather
it a relationship with irony that makes stories so humorous. He uses the example
of a child telling a younger child, who is only a little younger, to listen to
him because he is older. This is funny because of the irony in a small child
thinking he is considered older and wiser to a child not that much younger than
him. Irony is employed in The Gilded Six Bits when Joe finds out Missie May is
sleeping with another man. The irony is employed when instead of screaming or
any other normal reaction to being hurt/upset he instead “opened up his mouth
and laughed.” Our judgment is changed by the sheer irony and oddity of this man
laughing at what he has just witnessed: something that is definitely not funny.
This comes full circle in the end, after Joe and Missie May have had months and
months of marital problems the store clerk says to another customer that he
wishes he could “laughin’ all the time” like Joe because “Nothin’ worries ‘em.”
The reader can chuckle at this because of the irony that we as the reader know something
the store clerk doesn’t: everything, in this moment, is worrying Joe.
Plato moves
the barometer on the humor spectrum a little further. Perhaps agreeing that
absurdities and irony play a small part in the basics of humor but ultimately
laughing causes us to “experience a mix of pain and pleasure”—the pain deriving
from our self-ignorance. In the specific cases of our readings this
self-ignorance is due to injustices we fail to realize.
Jesuit, and
justice advocate, Kolvenbach explains to us that our self-ignorance with
injustice is unacceptable and must be changed. He lays down the foundation to
not only recognize injustice but to also “…engage with human society, human
life, and the environment in appropriate ways, cultivating moral concern about
how people ought to live together.” One
way to engaged with human society to change their mind is through humor, changing
their judgment—as stated earlier on—and hitting them with a justice punch-line
and a call for change when they don’t even see it coming. In his Letter From
Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. highlighted one form of
injustice—racial prejudice—that needed a call to action because “injustice
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Humor is a subtle way, through
absurd stories and ironic moments, to “artfully
craft” (as Twain would say) a story that makes people laugh. And it is in that
moment of laughter, where Hobbes would say we’re laughing to express “glory
when we realize we are superior to someone else.” When humor reaches the top of the absurdity
spectrum and highlights injustice, it is that of realization of self-ignorance
through laughter that humor has the potential to stop being funny and to enact
change.
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