[Draft of a paper presented to the Montreal 'Reflection on Art and Aesthetics' Workshop, 9 April, 2009. To vote for a version of this essay in the 3QD Philosophy Prize Competition, go here.]
Justin E. H. Smith
We may as well start with a joke:
Primatologist to chimpanzee: “Bongo, bring me some food.”
(Bongo brings a pile of stones instead of food, and shows a wide, teeth-bearing grin.)
Alright, perhaps not a joke, really. More a primate proto-joke. However we classify it, though, I believe this report (based on a true story), gives us everything we need to generate a theory of humour. To get there, we will have first to do some propaedeutic work, in order to determine exactly what such a theory ought to explain, as also some metatheoretical work to explain where exactly such a theory fits in relation to other, similar projects.
1. The Funny and the Beautiful
Arthur Danto has noted that every systematic philosopher, whether a refined aesthete or a complete philistine, has at some point taken on the topic of art. One might add that nearly every one of these has included an account of wit, humour, jokes, comedy, or laughter, or some combination of these, within his theory of art and beauty. Why is this? Is gelastics –to borrow a neologism coined by Mary Beard from the Greek ‘gelan’: ‘to laugh’-- a subdomain of aesthetics? Let us consider some of the reasons for holding such a view.
There seems to be a great similarity between the way people talk about the ‘aesthetic stance’ and the way they conceive the ‘sense of humour’. The perception of something as a joke or as a work of art requires a certain stance or perspective. Even if it is hard to say what this will be, it seems that the explanations for the one often serve just as well as accounts for the other. For example, Edward Bullough’s criterion of psychical distance, which would account for the reluctance theatre-goers feel at the thought of getting up to save Desdemona from Othello, seems to function in the same way to provide the moral distancing that enables one to laugh at a cruel joke (and most, perhaps all, jokes are cruel, a point to which we might return later).
