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Humour and Incongruity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Michael Clark
Michael Clark
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham.
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The question “What is humour?” has exercised in varying degrees such philosophers as Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer and Bergson and has traditionally been regarded as a philosophical question. And surely it must still be regarded as a philosophical question at least in so far as it is treated as a conceptual one. Traditionally the question has been regarded as a search for the essence of humour, whereas nowadays it has become almost a reflex response among some philosophers to dismiss the search for essences as misconceived. Humour, it will be said, is a family-resemblance concept: no one could hope to compile any short list of essential properties abstracted from all the many varieties of humour— human misfortune and clumsiness, obscenity, grotesqueness, veiled insult, nonsense, wordplay and puns, human misdemeanours and so on, as manifested in forms as varied as parody, satire, drama, clowning, music, farce and cartoons. Yet even if the search for the essence of humour seems at first sight unlikely to succeed, I do not see how we can be sure in advance of any conceptual investigation; and in any case we might do well to start with the old established theories purporting to give the essence of humour, for even if they are wrong they may be illuminatingly wrong and may help us to compile a list of typical characteristics.

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Articles
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Philosophy , Volume 45 , Issue 171 , January 1970, pp. 20 - 32
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1970

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References

1 I shall use the expression ‘apparently incongruous’ for what is seen as incongruous, although it is not as appropriate as I would wish.

2 I think it is likely that there are alternative, but fundamentally equivalent, accounts of incongruity, say in terms of conflicting concepts under which an instance is being subsumed, or simply in terms of an instance's being subsumed under a concept under which it does not fall. My remarks on incongruous subsumption are not intended to give a complete, non-circular definition of ‘incongruous’.

3 See footnote 1.

4 Taylor points out that it must really be the action or passion itself that is wanted, not an end-product of it, unless this is also an action or passion. Thus, if I write a philosophical paper wanting to do so for its own sake, I may want either (i) ‘my writing this paper’, or (ii) ‘there being a paper on this topic written by me’, and only in the first case will I necessarily enjoy writing it. Obviously I can write a paper I want to write for its own sake without particularly enjoying what I do, but in that case I will want (ii) as distinct from (i).

5 But it needn't be only because.

6 I think it may be possible to define some other concepts in the same family as amusement in a similar way—I am thinking of some particular species of amusement. What is it to find something ludicrous or farcical or comic or witty, for example? Sometimes a definition can be obtained by narrowing the genus, enjoyment: e.g. finding something hilarious or mirthful is a species of more intense enjoyment, or perhaps of enjoyment the expression of which is typically uninhibited. Sometimes the formal object under the genus enjoyment can be restricted: to find something comic is not just to find it incongruous but to find it obviously and unsubtly so. In the case of finding something witty either procedure seems available: it is not just enjoyment but intellectual enjoyment, enjoyment requiring some exercise of the intellect. Again, if something is found to be witty it is found to be subtly incongruous. In this case the two methods of definition are equivalent.