Philosophy takes all things, even silly things, seriously. Perhaps for this reason, philosophers have tended to shy away from the lighter side of life. Philosophers, from Aristotle to Kant, write in disparaging terms about laughter, as unnecessary or simply cruel.
This antipathy towards humour belies the fact that philosophers and comedians often make use of the same ‘tools’, eg rhetoric, hyperbole, simile, analogy and metaphor – and who can forget Monty Python’s famous ‘Argument Sketch’? Or perhaps it is because humour adopts many of the same tools that philosophers have tended to marginalise it.
In the last 150 years or so philosophers have started to take humour seriously. In doing so, philosophical theories of humour have evolved to better account for what humour is; and to explain why some things are funny and some things are not.
But humour is not simply about what makes us laugh. There is an absurd quality to humour that involves, in William James’ words, seeing ‘the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar’. That is to say, humour often surprises us with what we know all too well. This too is the aim of many philosophers, ie to shed light on those aspects of human nature that so are familiar to us that we don’t even notice them. I will suggest, therefore, that philosophers can learn a great deal from comedians (and vice versa). Certainly, amidst our historical and philosophical examination of humour, it is my intention to share many jokes (some better than others). Not simply to make us laugh, but also to make us think.
