Introduction
In The Critique of Judgment , Kant classifies laughter as a sub-species of the beautiful. Despite this classification, he goes on to locate the pleasure of laughter not in a harmony of the faculties, but in a "bodily quickening" which promotes health by "...the furtherance of the vital processes in the body." (1) Kant's account of laughter here actually recalls Burke's theory of the sublime.
In fact, when we look at the mechanisms involved in different "laughing situations," we see that far from exhibiting the natural ease found in the contemplation of objects of beauty, laughter involves a jarring confrontation with incongruities. Humorous laughter is made possible by a disposition to interpret these incongruities in a pleasurable manner. By integrating unexpected conflicts into the understanding in accordance with the pleasure principle, the humorist transforms a potentially distasteful circumstance into an occasion for laughter.
Humorous laughter, then, is related to the sublime experience in that it involves the transformation of a potentially unpleasant perception into a pleasurable experience. However, whereas sublimity is associated with feelings of awe and respect, humorous laughter is associated with the inconsistent feelings of superiority and contempt. This difference is a result of the fact that sublimity is an affective response involving an individual's perception of his own vulnerability while humorous laughter is a response involving perceived invulnerability.
Kant was correct in locating the sublime not in the world's objects, but in the human mind. The same is true for humor. Not only do we respect those who are capable of looking at the world in a humorous or sublime manner, we especially value and esteem those who struggle to represent and communicate such interpretations. Nietzsche treated tragedy and comedy as especially noteworthy artistic attempts to represent mankind's experiences of the sublime and humorous. Without tragedy and comedy, "...man now sees everywhere only the terror or the absurdity of existence..." (2), but through their lenses, mankind finds a kind of pleasure. Tragedy gives us sublime pleasure while comedy gives us humorous, absurd pleasure, yet both are kinds of "artistic conquest." Nietzsche's exaltation of laughter in his later works suggests a turning away from the notion that comedy is a "degenerate" form of dramatic representation, since in humor lies the power to conquer one's own despair and resentment towards the world. Both the sublime and humorous allow one to "think the most abysmal thought" -- that life terminates in nothing -- while affirming and even taking pleasure in this thought.
The Beautiful, the Sublime and Laughter
The aesthetic categories of the "beautiful" and the "sublime" have long been contrasted with one another. On the one hand, beautiful objects produce in humans a kind of pleasure which we associate with feelings of liking or love. It seems natural that humans should feel compelled to linger on such objects of contemplation. The easy pleasure that beauty produces in us is its own justification. On the other hand, sublime objects are associated with feelings of fear, danger and terror, and so the pleasure that we take in their contemplation seems much more mysterious. Why is it that humans feel compelled to linger in reflection on objects of overwhelming power and terrifying destructive force? What possible pleasure can we take from these experiences?
In answering these last two questions, theorists such as Burke and Kant have provided us with accounts which help to make sense of the sublime and its relation to the beautiful. For Burke, beautiful objects are those things which, in our perception of them, have "a natural tendency to relax the fibres," (3) ultimately "relaxing the solids of the whole system." (4) This physical state of the body produces a feeling of love in us, and we judge objects capable of affecting us in this way "beautiful." Smoothness, sweetness and gentle variation are the sorts of qualities capable of bringing about this effect.
Sublime pleasure, while also rooted in mankind's physiological constitution, is associated with a feeling of terror rather than love. For Burke, sublime experiences are the result of moderated encounters with vast, dark and overwhelming objects. These qualities produce painful vibrations in the "finer organs" of the body which, like the "grosser organs," require stimulation and exercise in order to remain healthy. When not carried to violence or to the destruction of the body, these vibrations produce delight and health as they "...clear the parts...of a dangerous and troublesome incumbrance..." (5) Objects of sublime pleasure, then, serve to stimulate our senses, thereby alleviating the unhealthy physiological consequences of inactivity.
Kant's treatment of the beautiful and the sublime links beauty to a feeling of pleasure and the sublime to a feeling of respect. In the case of the beautiful, the presentation of an object's form to our mind initiates an interplay between the imagination and the understanding. This interplay is associated with a feeling of pleasure emerging from the mind's recognition of its own role in finding purpose in that which is without intrinsic purpose. The presentation of an object functions to motivate the mind itself into an active search for meaning. Nature is beautiful only because it awakens humans to their own ability to judge tastefully in accord with the freedom of imagination and the lawfulness of understanding. Ultimately then, the beautiful is "the facilitated play of the two mental powers (imagination and understanding) quickened by their reciprocal harmony." (6) As such, it is not the object in nature that is beautiful, but rather the harmony between the faculties of imagination and understanding, triggered by the form of an object and associated with a feeling of pleasure.
Whereas the beautiful involves a positive pleasure, the sublime involves a negative sort of pleasure. What is called sublime, according to Kant, is that which is associated with a sense of being overpowered and with a feeling of fear and apprehension. The feeling is triggered not by the form of objects in nature (as with the beautiful), but by the apparent formlessness of those absolutely large things which are beyond our powers of perception and imagination. Whether this chaos be of a mathematical or dynamic type, it motivates the mind towards comprehension, but since in chaos there is no meaning, the mind cannot even find a subjective purposiveness in the phenomenon being considered. The imagination is frustrated in its attempt to comprehend (or even apprehend) the absolutely large all at once, and so it turns towards reason in an attempt to find some sort of unifying principle by which to understand the totality of the phenomenon. This reason provides in terms of the "infinite." Our liking of the sublime is a kind of respect, initially triggered by our displeasure over the imagination's inadequacy, but ultimately culminating in the triumph over nature by way of reason. Our reason, in a sense, frees us from nature and allows us to experience the feelings of respect which are appropriate to us as creatures governed by the "ought" of moral law, rather than the fear of creatures governed by the "is" of nature. "Hence sublimity is contained not in any thing of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious of our superiority to nature within us, and thereby also to nature outside us..." (7)
Is the pleasure of laughter correctly classified as beautiful or sublime? Burke never mentions laughter in his Philosophical Enquiry , but Kant offers an unambiguous answer to this question. According to Kant, laughter begins in the free "play of thought" (8) rather than in the physical confrontation with something large and overwhelming, and for this reason he treats laughter as a sub-species of the beautiful rather than of the sublime. Kant claims that when we laugh at a jest, our understanding forms an expectation which it eventually finds mistaken, and as this expectation disappears into nothing, a "slackening" of the mind occurs which is transmitted to the bodily organs and experienced as laughter. This bodily quickening furthers our feeling of health and is the true source of the pleasure in laughter.
But here Kant seems to slip. Earlier he located beautiful pleasure in the mind's play of the faculties; specifically in a harmony between the imagination and the understanding. But the pleasure of laughter, Kant goes on to claim, is "merely bodily, even though it is aroused by ideas of the mind...and consists [merely] in the feeling of health that is produced by an intestinal agitation corresponding to such play. It is not our judging of the harmony we find in tones or in flashes of wit...but the furtherance of the vital processes in the body , the affect that agitates the intestines and the diaphragm, in a word the feeling of health...which constitutes the gratification..." (9) So, rather than with the calm contemplation of "subjective purposiveness," Kant associates laughing pleasure with the furtherance of health through bodily agitation. His own characterization of laughter here seems to conform more closely with the "Burkean Sublime" than it does with the "Kantian Beautiful."
In noticing this similarity between Kant's characterization of laughter and the Burkean Sublime, attention is at the same time drawn to a glaring difference between the two experiences. Whereas sublime feelings have mixed in with them elements of respect and awe, these elements are totally absent from laughing situations. In fact, for something to be laughable, it seems as though it must in some sense be contemptible and low. According to Aristotle, we laugh at "the Ridiculous," and "the aim of Comedy is to exhibit men as worse...than those of the present day." (10) But this is certainly not the way that the sublime works. Having shown that there is a problem with the easy categorization of laughter as either beautiful or sublime, it will now be necessary to look at laughter in a bit more detail and to draw some distinctions between the differing varieties of "laughing situations." This should allow us to clarify the mechanisms involved in laughter and help us to discern its relationship to beauty and sublimity with more precision.
Jokes, Comedy and Humor
Laughter itself is merely a sound that humans produce under certain conditions and is not so interesting as the processes underling its production. (11) The philosophy of laughter is not so much concerned with "laughter" as with "laughter about something." (12) In the classification of various "laughing situations," philosophers and psychologists have gone a long way towards clarifying what it is that humans laugh about. Despite the multitude of theories claiming to explain "why" people laugh, most of these theories take as their starting point a distinction between jokes, comedy and humor.
Jokes
Joking situations include those circumstances in which a story or narrative is intentionally constructed in order to evoke laughter. Jokes have been discussed at length by Freud as involving processes similar to those at work in dreams, namely "condensation and the formation of a substitute," (13) and at the level of technique, Freud's theory of jokes is almost indistinguishable from Kant's. When following a story or narrative, our minds anticipate an outcome by picking up on the clues and cues embedded in the story by the story teller. A joke, however, is structured so as to subvert and misdirect our expectations by utilizing various methods of ambiguity. In a joke, there is more than one possible outcome which would sensibly complete the story, and the jokester purposely misdirects his listeners towards the wrong conclusion until the very last instant. This deception by the jokester encourages the listener's understanding to form a false expectation which, with the delivery of the punch-line, disappears "into nothing," (14) in Kant's terminology, or is "laughed off" in Freud's. For Kant, laughter results when the mind, agitated and vacillating back and forth between the punch-line and its lost expectation, communicates this movement to the body. For Freud, it results when the "psychic energy" originally marshaled for one purpose is found to be unnecessary, and so is discharged in laughter.
Consider the following joke:
Here the subverted expectation is that an unfaithful man normally tries to escape his wife's suspicion and would certainly avoid being caught in the same room as a nude woman. As the joke begins, we anticipate that the man will try to find some manner of concealing his affair, but our initial expectation of how he will do so disappears "into nothing" when we realize that for a certain kind of artist, being in a room alone with a nude woman is part of the profession and so may be less suspicious than being alone in a room with a fully clothed woman.
Kant emphasizes that in order for a joke to be funny, the expectation of the listener must be transformed into nothing and "not into the positive opposite of an expected object, for that is always something and may frequently grieve us." (16) In other words, the punch-line must not simply contradict the expectations of the listener. If the above joke was reformulated as follows:
the joke would not make us laugh. Simply contradicting the listeners' expectations brings discomfort rather than pleasure. It demonstrates to us that our initial expectations were simply not applicable to this case. In a funny joke, though our expectations may be misdirected, our more general assumptions about the world are validated. The first formulation of the joke is funny because it plays off of our common belief that unfaithful husbands generally try to avoid detection. The second formulation is not funny because it simply contradicts that common assumption. This is a key point that should be kept in mind. Part of the pleasure of jokes derives from the mind's ability to integrate unexpected possibilities into the understanding. When we laugh at a joke, we do so because we recognize that an unanticipated outcome sensibly completes a story without contradicting our general assumptions about what the world is like. We delight in the discovery of new possibilities without being threatened by the dangers of anomie, normlessness and chaos.
I mentioned earlier that at the level of technique, Kant and Freud's theories of jokes are very similar. There is, however, a distinction drawn by Freud but neglected by Kant which may help to explain why Kant was lured into classifying laughter as a sub-species of the beautiful. Freud distinguishes between "innocent" and "tendentious" jokes. Tendentious jokes are those which give vent to aggressive or sexual drives, and their main purpose is to circumvent psychological blockages standing in the way of the free expression of life and death instincts. Innocent jokes, on the other hand, serve no such purpose. They "begin as play, in order to derive pleasure from the free use of words and thoughts." (17) It is innocent jokes, thus, which do seem to fit neatly into Kant's category of the beautiful. Tendentious jokes, being characterized by the struggle to overcome the repression of hidden drives, seem not so beautiful. This latter form of joke has something of the terrifying in it, giving vent to sublimated urges which are primitive and potentially overwhelming. In the controlled context of joking, however, these sublimated urges are conquered and mastered. Through the ingenuity of the jokester, the power of the Id is harnessed to turn the wheels of laughter.
Comedy
Whereas jokes are constructed, comedy is found in the world. The most common species of comedy is the "naive." Naivete is in a sense the contrary of joking insofar as no situations involving naivetŽ involve deception. Instead, it would never occur to the naive person to disguise his innocent intentions, and we laugh at him for this very reason. Most of us normally feel compelled to veil our true desires and wants behind a tapestry of social convention, and so our interactions with one another are often mediated by the expectation that we will have to second-guess the true intentions of others. However, when we encounter the naive person, this expectation, to use Kant's terms, "disappears into nothing." Naivete consists in "the eruption of the sincerity that originally was natural to humanity and which is opposed to the art of dissimulation that has become our second nature." (18)
Kant points out that the spectator, in finding someone naive, reveals his own possession of a set of expectations not shared by the object of laughter. In Freud we find some further, very insightful observations concerning this contrast. According to Freud, when a situation is seen as comic, it appears to the spectator that the people involved in the comedy overcome their own inhibitions without any effort. This is, of course, because the inhibitions in question are not present in them. At some level the spectator must indeed believe this, otherwise the comedic behavior would instead appear "impudent." But it is this power to judge someone comic rather than impudent that the pleasure of comedy relies upon. "The discovery that one has it in one's power to make someone else comic opens the way to an un-dreamt-of yield of comic pleasure..."(19) To view a situation as comic is, in this sense, not only to discover the ability within one's self to interpret a situation in more than one way, but to opt for the more pleasurable interpretation.
Consider the following scenario:
A child is in attendance at a party thrown by his parents. All of the guests are marveling at the delicious cake that the hostess has served for desert. One guest asks for the recipe, and the hostess simply smiles and nods. The child, however, blurts out, "But mommy, you didn't bake that cake yourself! You bought it at the store!"
Our immediate reaction is to see the comedy in this situation. The child appears naively comic because he is inappropriately honest. We laugh at him because we assume that there is no malicious intent in his comment, only an unreflective adherence to the principle of honesty. We snicker and say, "Oh, he didn't know any better." If, however, an adult had made the same comment, we might not find the situation so comic. Instead we would probably assume that some sort of underlying resentment against the hostess was being expressed. The point remains that regardless of what is in fact motivating certain behaviors, the comic dimension of those behaviors is dependent upon how we as spectators interpret the scenarios. If we think the worst of a person's motivation, we will not find comedy. If, on the other hand, we assume no malicious intent, but attribute only naivetŽ to the actor, we may discover comic pleasure.
Humor
The temper that allows humans to make jokes and find comedy in the world is called "humor" or a "whimsical manner." Kant calls the whimsical manner "the talent enabling us to put ourselves at will into a certain mental disposition, in which everything is judged in a way quite different from the usual one (even vice versa)..." (20) Freud likewise writes that with humor, "one spares oneself the affects to which the situation would naturally give rise and overrides with a jest the possibility of such an emotional display." (21) In both cases, humor is characterized as a talent or ability which enables a human being to interpret the world in a manner different from what others might expect. A person with a humorous manner sees the world differently from those who do not possess such a manner, and he is able to find pleasure where others find only pain and displeasure.
A humorous attitude elevates a human being above the dangers of the world. In the humorist, Freud claimed that we find an ego which forsakes the "reality principle" in favor of the "pleasure principle," and in so doing approximates the processes involved in psychopathology. Humor refuses to suffer in the face of adversity, but demands some sort of pleasure from the world. It rebels against the natural order of things, liberating humans from the chains of nature. Even in the face of abjection we find authors like Kristeva describing an "apocalyptic laughter" which occurs when the line between horror and ecstasy becomes blurred, as in the writings of Celine. This kind of laughter taps the unconscious, allowing the repressed drives of life and death to vent in pleasurable expression. Humor is subversive, and in making the world's dangers small, it makes the humorist invincible.
It should be clear that this discussion of "laughing situations" is not meant to be exhaustive. There are certainly many other situations, such as when a person is tickled or hysterical, in which laughter is not at all associated with a humorous attitude. In limiting our discussion to laughter which is rooted in humor, we are restricting our examination to laughter as an aesthetic phenomenon. This strategy should allow us to focus more clearly on the relationship of laughter to the beautiful and the sublime.
Humorous laughter erupts when we face certain types of incongruities in the world. Jokes teach us that we can achieve pleasure from the discovery of new, unexpected possibilities, while comedy teaches us that certain incongruous situations are subject to more than a single interpretation or affective response. Together these laughing situations suggest that humorous laughter functions in a manner quite similar to the sublime. It allows us to linger in pleasurable contemplation on initially unpleasant circumstances. When jarring incongruities confront us with our inadequate and incomplete knowledge of the world, laughter shows us that we can extract pleasure and enrichment from this situation. Yet there still seems to be an incompatibility between laughter and the sublime. Laughter finds pleasure in its refusal to take the world's dangers seriously while sublime pleasure requires superlative seriousness. In John Morreall's theory of incongruity we find the hint of a possible explanation for this difference.
John Morreall's Theory of Incongruity
In his paper "Funny Ha-Ha, Funny Strange, and Other Reactions to Incongruity," John Morreall offers a theory explaining why we react with fear to some kinds of incongruity and laughter to others. He claims that when we encounter incongruities in the world, we have three natural, separate types of reactions. The first is to experience negative emotions like fear, anger disgust and sadness. The second is to experience puzzlement. The third is to experience humorous enjoyment. Because incongruity is an apparent deviation from "the way things are supposed to be," it is a sign that our knowledge of the world's structure is deficient, and that consequently our ability to navigate through the environment is in danger. Living with certain kinds of unresolved incongruities has negative survival value. Negative emotions and puzzlement are reactions that motivate us towards resolving incongruities, while humorous enjoyment allows us to linger on those incongruities which are not immediately dangerous to us.
Negative emotional reactions to incongruity impel us towards regaining control over our immediate circumstances. For instance when we feel fear, our bodies undergo certain physiological changes which motivate us to run away from danger, fight it, cover our faces, etc. All of these reactions serve to give us some control over what happens and allow us to avoid or to minimize injury. Even emotions like sadness have this practical element to them. In sadness, bodily functions slow down and we withdraw from the situations which caused us pain, allowing us time to recuperate and regain control over our lives. Negative emotions, then, have a positive, practical function in that they motivate us towards regaining control over the world when it has slipped out of our command.
Puzzlement is a reaction to incongruity that shares many similarities with negative emotional responses. When we are puzzled by a situation, we experience a kind of tension and uneasiness. However, unlike with negative emotions, when we are puzzled, it is our understanding of the world, and not the world itself, that we want to be different. We have a desire to "assimilate reality" when we encounter puzzling, incongruous situations which don't fit into our understanding of the world. In this drive towards assimilation, we strive to increase our control by way of being able to anticipate and predict events. We try to relate the unfamiliar to the already familiar, thereby increasing our understanding, knowledge and mastery of reality.
Cases of negative emotional reaction and puzzlement, then, share three common qualities: 1. In both there is uneasiness about a situation. 2. In both cases this uneasiness concerns a loss of control. 3. Both reactions motivate action towards changing the situation.
But there is a third reaction that we have to incongruity. This Morreall calls "humorous amusement." Unlike the reactions discussed above, with humorous amusement there is no associated uneasiness, sense of lost control, or desire for active change. Humorous amusement, rather, is accompanied by feelings of pleasure and the desire to prolong contact with incongruity. Morreall suggests that an overemphasis on the analysis of joking situations has led many psychologists to the conclusion that the resolution of incongruity, as in a punch-line, is where humorous amusement lies. He points out that, on the contrary, there are many instances where unresolved incongruity also leads to humorous amusement in certain jokes, cartoons, and real life. How could there be pleasure in unresolved incongruity?
The answer Morreall gives is that there is survival value in "our drive to seek variety in cognitive input." (22) This kind of variety encourages our curiosity about the world, resulting in an improved ability to adapt and survive. Incongruous situations which do not produce negative emotions or puzzlement are occasions for humorous enjoyment because they are novel yet do not threaten our physical survival or our overall beliefs about the structure of the world. Humorous enjoyment motivates us to linger in our contemplation of certain kinds of novel situations, stimulating our ability to deal with newness and preparing us for encounters with other types of threatening incongruity.
This characterization is in harmony with everything we have observed about humorous laughter so far, and it also suggests a simple and plausible explanation of sublimity. Morreall's theory tells us that negative emotional states serve to motivate humans towards action and thus to deal with dangerous incongruities in the environment. If I open a door and find a King Cobra coiled and ready to strike, my reaction to this unexpected situation is to feel fear and run away. My fear motivates me to act in such a manner that I can go on to live another day, and perhaps learn to be more cautious when I open doors in the future.
But imagine a situation where I feel fear due to an incongruity between my own puniness and the threatening power of a tremendous thunderstorm. My instinct may be to run away or to defend myself, but in this circumstance such courses of action are useless. I am helpless to defend myself and I can't run away. Nothing I do will allow me to gain control over weather phenomenon, and so the only option I have is to wait out the storm. In circumstances such as this, negative emotional reactions may make us wish that we could change the conditions, but the overwhelming nature of the situation makes such change impossible.
Now, I have only a few options under these circumstances. The first option is to allow my fear to develop to such an unbearable degree that I experience the total terror of a phobic response. But this is to experience a form of mental breakdown; a condition which leaves me helpless. I might also faint and go unconscious, avoiding dealing with the fear altogether but also making myself vulnerable and unaware of opportunities for escape. My final option is to somehow find pleasure in my confrontation with the feared situation. The only way I can do this is to change my subjective response to the phenomenon in question, and so I must, in order to exercise this option, somehow harness my fear for the purposes of pleasure. The sublime experience is the outcome of this struggle to find pleasure in circumstances of powerlessness where the only other psychological options are completely undesirable.
This approach to the sublime explains its similarities as well as its differences in relation to humor. Both humorous laughter and the sublime are reactions to confrontations with incongruity. Humorous laughter results when we confront unthreatening incongruities. Because these novelties present no danger to us, lingering on them stimulates the mind and its "finer organs," creating pleasure and promoting our ability to deal with other, perhaps more threatening, surprises that the world might spring on us in the future. Sublime pleasure, on the other hand, results when we confront threatening incongruities against which we are completely powerless to defend ourselves. Normally, negative emotions motivate us to run away from or fight the objects of our fear. But when confronted with objects of sublimity, we are completely overwhelmed and unable to take action to change our situation. The only positive option in such circumstances is to reorient ourselves towards the world in accordance with the pleasure rather than the reality principle. The experience of the sublime is, thus, the last means of extracting pleasure from a world that offers us only pain.
The nature of humorous and sublime incongruity further explains why humor is associated with feelings of superiority and contempt while sublimity is associated with feelings of respect and awe. Unthreatening incongruities, as found in jokes and comedy, make us feel superior and elevated because: 1. They pose no danger to our physical well being. 2. They pose no danger to our overall beliefs about the world. 3. Jokes with punch-lines give us the opportunity to exercise our powers of "reality assimilation" in facing unexpected possibilities. 4. Comedy gives us the opportunity to exercise our interpretive powers when we choose to view a situation as comic rather than impudent. These four qualities give us a feeling of mightiness and invulnerability in the face of the world's unmenacing surprises.
Tremendously threatening incongruities, as found in the sublime experience, create feelings of respect and awe because: 1. They pose some threat to our physical well being or, 2. they pose a threat to our beliefs about the world. 3. In threatening us with harm we are powerless to defend ourselves except through the exercise of our interpretive powers. 4. In the exercise of our interpretive powers we discover, as Kant pointed out, that we are ultimately capable of extracting pleasure from nature's overwhelming threat to our well being. We feel respect and awe for the foe who pushes us to the extreme edge of human potential.
The artistic representation of humorous and sublime incongruity has produced some of the most enriching and noble works of mankind. In Greek comedy and tragedy we find an example of the artistic attempt to represent human confrontation with both the great and small dangers of the world.
Nietzsche, Laughter, Tragedy and the Eternal Return
Nietzsche's very first book, The Birth of Tragedy , was an attempt to analyze the development of Greek Tragedy in terms of the competing impulses of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. These impulses, in fact, are useful in analyzing the structure of all human interpretation as well as the relationship between the humorous and the sublime.
Nietzsche claimed that all art was an attempt to represent the world's underlying Dionysian nature. But this puts the artist in a paradoxical situation, as the Dionysian resists the imposition of form or structure. It is the frenzy and chaos of nature, the destruction of the principle of individuation, which characterizes Dionysus. Art, however, requires the imposition of form, individuation and structure. Hence, the artist must enlist the aid of Apollo in his drive to create works. The Apollonian is the impulse to represent and organize reality so that we as humans may linger in contemplation on the product of interpretation. The artist is, consequently, forever caught among the competing powers of Apollo and Dionysus, being pulled back and forth between the need for representation and the force of energetic impulses.
Both comedy and tragedy, as forms of artistic display, share a common motivation. They seek to represent the Dionysian, but they emphasize different aspects of its nature. On the one hand, Dionysus is terrible. He embodies pain, cruelty, agony and the diminution of the individual into nothing. "Dionysian music in particular excited awe and terror." (23) Its dissonance dissolved individuals back into nature's flux, overpowering and annihilating them. On the other hand, Dionysus is absurd. He embodies the joy found in never ending play and action. The terrible and the absurd are one in Dionysus, but in art they may be distinguished, moderated and represented in a manner which spectators find bearable. Tragedy gives us a sublime pleasure which moderates nature's terror while comedy gives us an absurd pleasure.
In comedic portrayals, the ridiculous, self important actions of contemptible people are represented as incongruous with the audience's understanding of appropriate behavior in the world. The audience in a comedy feels superior to the characters in the performance because they know something that the characters don't know. The naive behavior of Socrates in Aristophane's The Clouds , for example, makes us laugh because the pretentious proclamations of the philosopher reveal his lack of the common sense possessed by the rest of us. The Socrates of Aristophanes thinks he has resolved the conflict between Apollo and Dionysus, but his seriousness and claims to truth are inappropriate given what we know, and when we laugh, we laugh at this unthreatening incongruity. We find absurd pleasure in this portrayal of the ridiculous.
In tragic portrayals, the characters are the best and most noble examples that mankind has to offer, but their nobility cannot save them from being swallowed up by fate. The incongruity represented in tragedy is that even the greatest efforts of the highest men are inadequate to oppose the necessities of nature. Tragedy shows us that "the best and the highest that men can acquire they must obtain by crime, and then they must in turn endure its consequences, namely, the whole flood of sufferings and sorrows with which the offended divinities must requite the nobly aspiring race of man."24 In tragedy, even the divinities are governed by nature and necessity, and the sublime pleasure of being a spectator of the drama consists in the terrifying feeling of our collective vulnerability to the cosmos.
Comedy and Tragedy, then, allow us to linger on a representation of nature's "truth." This truth is most similar in essence to "the wonderful significance of musical dissonance." (25) Unresolved musical tension is a direct mirror of nature, and in confronting it we face the incongruity between Apollo and Dionysus. This contrast is constantly reflected in the lack of harmony between the world and our representations, but it spurs humans on to feats of artistic and interpretive greatness.
Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy thus helps us to see the deep connection between humor and the sublime. Although we find him here claiming that comedy is a "degenerate form of tragedy," in his later works, especially Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science , Nietzsche seems to abandon this position and recognizes in humorous laughter a powerful means of overcoming despair and resentment towards the world. At the very end of Book Three of Zarathustra , upon articulating the doctrine of the Eternal Return of the Same, Zarathustra proclaims:
"...for in laughter all that is evil comes together, but is pronounced holy and absolved by its own bliss; and if this is my alpha and omega, that all that is heavy and grave should become light; all that is body, dancer; all that is spirit bird -- and verily, that is my alpha and omega: Oh how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?" (26)
Conclusion
Nietzsche's praise of laughter in his later works was motivated by the same impulse which motivated his earlier praise of tragedy. In laughter he saw a power which allows humans to linger in the contemplation of life's incongruities. However, unlike the sublime pleasure produced by tragedy, laughter yields a pleasure which elevates mankind above the world's dangers. From this elevated position, humans may affirm and take pleasure in all that once seemed fearful and terrible, willing that everything that has happened should happen again in exactly the same way. This willful affirmation of even the most painful and wicked events is the final antidote to nihilism. Laughing pleasure is the highest sign of spiritual fullness.
Nietzsche's works illuminate the connection between humor and the sublime. In the struggle between Dionysus and Apollo, artistic interpretation is pulled between frenzy and order, giving articulation to the incongruities which underlie life. When forced to confront these incongruities, we are made aware of our own limited knowledge and power. However, this need not be painful. Sublime pleasure allows us, in Kant's words, to "become conscious of our superiority to nature." Yet it is humorous laughter that is actually the symptom of ultimate superiority. The sublime, being associated with awe and respect, still has the flavor of submission to it. Humorous laughter, on the other hand, is rebellious and impertinent. It rejects reality in favor of pleasure at any cost.
The most profound incongruity is the contrast between the individual and eternity. If it is possible to accept that division as unthreatening, the experience will be accompanied by laughter.
Bibliography
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Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1986).
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968).
Paul Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (Oxford University Press, 1996).
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Penguin Books, 1978).
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Hackett Publishing Company, 1987).
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia University Press, 1982).
John Morreall (ed.), The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor (State University of New York Press, 1987).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (Dover Publications, 1995).
-----------------------, The Portable Nietzsche (Penguin Books, 1984).
Notes
(1) Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p. 203.
(2) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (Dover Publications, 1995), p. 23.
(3) Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), p. 150.
(4) Ibid, p. 149.
(5) Ibid, p. 136.
(6) Kant, p. 63.
(7) Ibid, p. 123.
(8) Ibid, p. 202.
(9) Ibid, p. 203.
(10) Aristotle, Poetics (J.M. Dent and Sons, 1963), p. 5. (11) Some contemporary research in psychology makes much of the fact that laughter is a sound which is meant to be heard by others. Robert Provine and Steve Pinker consider laughter an alert which signals that a person means no harm to those around him. Their observations of people in everyday circumstances reveal that most laughter occurs in decidedly mundane, unfunny, circumstances. A recent segment on NPR's "Morning Edition" featured their findings which are presented in How the Mind Works (?, 1998). Laughter might, in this sense, be thought of as a developed form of warning call, or even in some circumstances as a type of scream. See: Slavoj Zizek, "Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears" (?), pp. 48 - 52.
(12) Roger Scrutton, "Laughter" in: John Morreall, The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor (State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 157.
(13) Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Penguin Books, 1976), p. 130.
(14) Kant, p. 204.
(15) Joey Adams, The Joey Adams Joke Dictionary (The Citadel Press, 1962), p. 27. I have slightly modified this joke from the form in which it appears in this book.
(16) Kant, p. 204.
(17) Freud, Jokes , p. 188.
(18) Kant, p. 206.
(19) Freud, Jokes , p. 248.
(20) Kant, p. 207.
(21) Sigmund Freud, "Humor" in: Morreall, p. 112.
(22) John Morreall, "Funny Ha-Ha, Funny Strange, and Other Reactions to Incongruity" in: Morreall, p. 201.
(23) Nietzsche, p. 7.
(24) Ibid, p. 32.
(25) Ibid, p. 90.
(26) Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in: The Portable Nietzsche (Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 342 - 343.