Wit and Humor

This course is a broadly-based investigation into the psychological, sociological, and literary functions of laughter and humor. Socrates notoriously never got around to explaining how comedy and tragedy are actually two versions of the same thing (like the crab in Alice in Wonderland who "taught Laughing and Grief"); Aristotle's comic sequel to the Poetics is lost; and literary criticism has always been more comfortable with high-minded theories of tragedy than with trying to explain comedy. Yet if anything, it is tragedy whose existence is all too easy to explain—suffering needs to be borne, and our yearning to find explanations is all too understandable—whereas it is laughter that seems mysterious. Why do we do it? Social laughter starts very early, during the first year of life: children learn the tune before they know the words. And while formal tragedy is specialized and rare, jokes, comedy, and farce are ubiquitous in every culture. Why is it generally believed that humorless people are defective and that laughter is somehow life-affirming? Thomas Hobbes saw laughter as aggressive "sudden glory" at someone else's expense, and that aspect of it should certainly be acknowledged, but more recent theories have described laughter as compensatory or even liberating. Some theories we consider are Sigmund Freud's influential hypothesis of the release of taboos, Henri Bergson's theory of the humor of the mechanical, and Mikhail Bakhtin's account of the carnivalesque. In addition, essays by psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists provide valuable tools for analysis. The course aims to bring a wide range of approaches to bear both on literature and on other forms, including films, television, stand-up comedy, and magazine cartoons. A wide range of topics and issues are considered, many of them more than once since they come up repeatedly as we consider specific texts and films. Some examples include the phenomenon of laughing; jokes and joking; differences between verbal wit and visual humor; satire and irony; humor in performance, especially stand-up comedy; obstacles that confront female humorists; sexual humor and taboo; religious humor (is nothing sacred?); ethnic humor, especially Jewish; parody and nonsense; and humor and comedy as a refusal of the tragic.