Everyday philosophy: What's so funny?

Norman Wisdom, who died on 4th October, was Charlie Chaplin’s favourite clown. His trademark pratfalls and contagious giggling as little guy Norman Pitkin spread mirth around the globe, particularly in Albania, where his were the only western movies to escape state censorship. Asked about his legacy, the man with the freedom of the city of Tirana remarked: “People will always find the sight of someone falling or spilling something funny.” He’s probably right, but why is that?

Ever since Aristotle (erroneously) pointed out that laughter is unique to humans, philosophers have struggled to understand humour. Most explanations have been lead balloons. Analysing humour, New Yorker wit EB White quipped, is “like dissecting a frog: few people are interested, and the frog dies.”

Take Thomas Hobbes’s claim that laughter stems from a sense of “sudden glory” when we discern our superiority over others. That might explain why Norman Pitkin’s antics amuse us (if they do), but it doesn’t explain why Monty Python’s philosophers’ football match—in which the toga-clad Greeks defeat the Germans with a late diving header from Socrates—is so funny. Here, the incongruity theory is more plausible. You can find it in Immanuel Kant and in Arthur Schopenhauer, both of whom thought that sudden absurdity had a part to play in humour. Yet not everything that is incongruous is funny. Freud, meanwhile, suggested that laughter provides emotional release by allowing forbidden thoughts into the conscious mind: a useful idea, but similarly incomplete.

But if the philosophy of humour is rarely enlightening and seldom funny, the humour of philosophers isn’t all it could be either. Sidney Morgenbesser, though, was in a class apart. When asked if he agreed that a statement could be both true and false, he replied: “Well I do and I don’t.” And nothing beats his snipe during a lecture by JL Austin. Austin had claimed that many languages use a double negative to mean something positive, but none a double positive to make a negative. Morgenbesser’s instant and audible dismissal: “Yeah, yeah.”