Philosophy of Humour

Phil Callaway says, "I have a fear of speed bumps, but I'm getting over it." Janice gave Ed a birthday present of Phil Callaway's newest book 'Laugh Again like a Child'. Reading this book caused us to laugh and chuckle deeply. We hoped then that we could interview Phil. Who might have imagined that a comedian could be a missionary? Phil was told that it would never work. "I took a lot of heat early on for combining a message of humour with a message of hope in Christ. To laugh didn't seem to be the holiest of things." Becoming a missionary comedian was not intentional:

What do philosophy and verbal humor have in common? And what about the German philos-opher G. W. F. Hegel and the Czech-German comedian Felix Holzmann? This book (The night one can bear hunt rabbits) answers these questions in a concise and rigorous manner, thus not only providing an introduction to philosophy and its problems through the comicality of lan-guage but also by a philosophical exegesis of humor on the basis of contrast and the negative conceptions of experience (“There have to be crooks in this world too,” said Švejk, lying down in his straw mattress. “If everyone were honest with each other, they’d soon start punching each other’s noses.”). In dealing with this exegesis, the book takes advantage of Hegel’s writings and, most importantly, Felix Holzmann’s sketches and dialogues.

The night during which one can go bear hunting for rabbits along with Holzmann is the night in which all cows are black, i.e. Hegel’s Absolute. In it, all conceptual differences – not only between bear and rabbit but, more generally, between true and false, beautiful and ugly, or good and bad – can vanish if one does not sufficiently value the complicated relation between language and the world. Language is not only the means for the arbitrary naming of how things are in the world (thus Engels’: “If I include a shoe-brush in the unity mammals, this does not help it to get mammary glands.”) but the medium of their meaning. Verbal humor reveals and manifests this truth that is, in fact, the truth about truth.

Col sorriso sulle labbra. La satira tra libertà di espressione e dovere di rispetto * SOMMARIO 1. Introduzione-2. La satira e il diritto alla libertà di espressione-3. Satira, umorismo e rispetto-4. Deridere la religione-5. Le basi morali della libertà di satira-6. Conclusioni.

Abstract
This small piece of qualitative research explores the musical nature of infant humour, focusing on playful interchange among a small group of children aged 2-3 in a day care setting.
Focusing on communicative interaction, this paper explores qualities of musical factors present in funniness such as rhythm, repetition and voice play – where, what I term, communicative musical funniness occurs between young children through complicitè, friendship and playfulness
The study investigates the musicality of funniness around the Multi-Modal nature of children’s interaction with the environment and those in it

The paper explores Tati's use of new film media in 'Playtime' in ways that reveal more fundamental modes of social, mimetic and situational mediation as performed in the film by architects, and architect-like characters, and by the architectural settings which Jacques Tati devised.

American Philosophical Association, 2021 Eastern division meeting (via Zoom)
Jan. 15, 2021, 11am EST session (= program update).
In this session of the International Association for the Philosophy of Humor, I’ll briefly present some ideas from Kant’s Humorous Writings (2020).

In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness.

By viewing comedy as both a constitutive feature of social interaction and as a necessary requirement in the appraisal of what is often deemed to be ‘politically correct’, this book provides an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the study of comedy and popular culture. In doing so, it engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to ‘PC Debates’, contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC ‘mockumentary’, The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies.

Drawing from psychoanalysis, social psychology and philosophy, this book will be highly relevant for postgraduate students and academic researchers studying comedy, race/racism, multiculturalism, political correctness and television/film.

A short presentation of humor and friendliness as something we owe to each other. As Chesterton puts it, "only friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness". 

Published in Italian: https://ares.mi.it/products-la-formula-del-buonumore-680.html
And in Spanish: https://www.eunsa.es/tienda/persona-y-cultura/1999-sonreir-amabilidad-y-buen-humor-en-la-vida-cotidiana.html
And in Portuguese: https://www.quadrante.com.br/formula-do-bom-humor-a

The double sense of animated images is a conceptual movement that calls attention to the surface of representation, instead of its actual contents. From the earliest age of cartoons, their high degree of self-reflexivity has reinforced the status of animation as an invented environment, building what has been labelled as the language of animation. In addition, the evidence of these images as an optical illusion has accelerated a formalist search for narrative processes, questioning the conventions of filmmaking as can be noticed on a heterogeneous but characteristic corpus of works: the independent short animated films, which lines exceed the regular routines of screenwriting. By analysing specific examples of animated films, this paper will discuss the extent to which visual ambiguity contributes to animated storytelling.

In this article, I argue against the claim made by Vassilis Saroglou that religion, and specifically Christianity, may be taken as an a priori incompatibility. This is done through a discussion of the reconciliation of theology and humor that is evident in the work of G. K. Chesterton — a theologian who was forever laughing, joking and defending the ephemeral. To navigate this reconciliation, I tackle Chesterton’s writings on two fronts. To begin with, after reading Chesterton through the lens offered William Desmond’s ‘fourfold sense of being’, I discuss his thinking on humor in terms of his distinctive articulation of Christianity in paradoxical terms. Secondly, I then discuss Chesterton’s views on humor with regard to his prioritization of the virtues of honesty, humility and hospitality in relation to his own paradoxical logic. In showing these two strands of his thinking — his paradoxy and morality — to be deeply intertwined, I suggest that the reconciliation of humor and theology is most perfectly located in and represented by what may be understood as the centre of Chesterton’s theological project: the desire that is expressed through the Christian hope for the renewal of all things.

Although it has been an almost ubiquitous discourse from ancient times to the present, satirists and critics do not agree on a single definition of satire. A synthetic definition of satire could be reached through a critical survey of its various definitions. Accordingly, satire is a discursive practice in a Foucauldian sense to which four elements, with varying degrees, are essential: attack or aggression, laughter or humor, play, and judgment. Defining satire as a Foucauldian discourse allows the critical analysis of its interactions with other discourses within respective power structures. Therefore, a general discursive model of satire is deduced according to which the discourse of satire not only shapes, but is also shaped by, five major discourses—namely discourses of economy, politics, morality, patriarchy, as well as learning and knowledge—through their negotiations and transactions within specific epistemes.

Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that ‘A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes’. The idea for this dialogue comes from a conversation that Michael Peters and Morwenna Griffiths had at the Philosophy of Education of Great Britain annual meeting at the University of Oxford, 2011. It was sparked by an account of an assessment of a piece of work where one of the external examiners unexpectedly exclaimed ‘I knew Jean-Paul Sartre’, trying to trump the discussion. This conversation is a dialogue about comedy and humor as a basis for philosophy, education and pedagogy that provides an introduction to recent works and a context for ongoing research. The concluding section provides further reflection on some of the main themes, drawing attention to the significance of humor in dialogues within philosophy and education, and suggesting that it has a particular role in resisting managerialism at all levels of educational institutions.

Дисертацію присвячено визначенню особливостей вербалізації комічного у текстах романів Л. Піранделло. Здійснено аналіз наукових робіт з історії естетичної, психологічної та філософської думки, мовознавчих студій, у яких розглянуто означену проблему. Зроблено критичний огляд міркувань письменника про комічне і виявлено, що висновки Л. Піранделло про гумор, висловлені у його теоретичній праці «L’umorismo», слід розглядати лише як проміжний етап творчої еволюції автора.
У дисертації систематизовано мовні засоби об’єктивації комічного у ранній великій прозі письменника (фонетичні, морфологічні, лексичні, синтаксичні та стилістичні), а також окреслено особливості їх застосування для вираження авторської іронії, сарказму, сатири та гумору.
Встановлено, що в концептосфері творів Л. Піранделло комічне виявляється у п’яти базових концептах: ТРАДИЦІЇ, РЕЛІГІЯ, БЮРОКРАТІЯ, МИСТЕЦТВО та НАУКА. Визначено їхню структуру та дихотомії, які покладено в основу реалізації комічної суперечності у межах кожного з них. Зафіксовано повторювані референти комічного у творах письменника.
Ключові слова: вербалізація, комічне, іронія, сарказм, сатира, гумор, концептосфера, концепт, семантичне поле, Піранделло, романи.

The thesis dwells upon specific features of verbal representation of the comical in L. Pirandello’s novels. It includes a multidisciplinary research on the aesthetic, psychological, philosophic, and linguistic approaches to the study of the comical. Furthermore, the thesis offers a critical view of the writer’s ideas on the comical and specifically on the humor theory presented in L. Pirandello’s essay «L’umorismo». The dissertation questions author’s thoughts and methods thus considering L. Pirandello’s critical oeuvre as a merely transitional stage in his creativity evolution.
The thesis also investigates the verbal means used to render author’s irony, sarcasm, satire, and humor and offers a systematization of the linguistic instruments (phonetic, morphological, lexical, syntactical, and stylistic) used by the writer to actualize the comical in his early prose.
The concept-sphere of L. Pirandello’s writings has also been thoroughly studied, and five major concepts constructing the comic senses were therefore defined: TRADITIONS, RELIGION, BUREAUCRACY, ART, and SCIENCE. This research studies their structure and individuates their dichotomy-based comic disparity. The thesis proposes a fixed list of comic referents in author’s novels.
Keywords: verbalization, the comical, irony, sarcasm, satire, humor, concept-sphere, concept, semantic field, Pirandello, novels.

In this chapter, the author will analyze the relationship between humor and power in the light of court jesters (comedians) and sovereign (president). The chapter offers a philosophical perspective on the social significance of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The theoretical framework is based on C. G. Jung’s theory of the archetypes, and especially on the concepts of the ‘shadow’ and the ‘trickster’

De todos os sábios da tradição médica no mundo islâmico, o mais conhecido talvez seja Abū c Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn c Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā, Avicena entre os latinos. Nascido na Pérsia em 980, numa pequena cidade da Ásia Central perto de Buḫārà, Afšana, o menino prodígio Avicena estudou filosofia e medicina desde cedo. Aos dez anos de idade já recitava de cor o Livro sagrado dos muçulmanos, o Corão, e aos dezesseis, segundo sua autobiografia, já exercia a prática da medicina. Na época, sua fama era tal que foi chamado pelo soberano de Buḫārà, o sultão Nūḥ ibn Manṣūr, para livrá-lo de uma moléstia incurável. Como recompensa por ter-lhe salvado a vida, o sultão abriu-lhe as portas de sua rica biblioteca, o que lhe permitiu o acesso a numerosas e desconhecidas obras dos autores antigos. Por razões políticas, Avicena sempre viajou muito pelos territórios da antiga Pérsia, e foi em Jurjān, no sudeste do Mar Cáspio, por volta de 1012, que iniciou a redação de seu célebre Livro do Cânone de Medicina (Kitāb al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb), só terminado mais tarde em Hama²ān, para onde se dirigiu em 1015. Foi nessa cidade, importante centro no oeste do atual Irã, que Avicena conheceu e serviu como médico ao príncipe Šams al-Dawla, que, curado de sua persistente cólica, ofereceu-lhe o vizirato, motivo de discórdias e infortúnios na vida de nosso médico-filósofo.

This chapter sketches a reconstruction of the concept of hidden inwardness that argues that the concept refers to ethico-religious characters that are expressed in deeds and words, rather than a private inner world. By relying on the distinction between morality and legality, I argue that “hidden inwardness” is not compatible with all kinds of behavior and that it is better described negatively than positively. The concept of hidden inwardness need therefore not be as problematic as is often assumed, since it mainly involves the idea that we do not know hearts and minds. Still, Kierkegaard’s later works use “hidden inwardness” in a different manner than the earlier pseudonymous writings. However, I argue that this change in use of the term involves more a change of emphasis, which prevents misuses of “hidden inwardness,” than any significant change of theoretical position. Finally, I show that “hidden inwardness” sheds light on the controversial theses “Subjectivity is truth” and “Subjectivity is untruth” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

Primera edición, agosto 2018
Araújo Pereira, Ricardo
La enfermedad, el sufrimiento y la muerte entran en un bar.
Una especie de manual de escritura humorística / Ricardo Araújo Pereira ; trad. de Jerónimo Pizarrro. -- Bogotá : FCE, 2018
102 p. ; 21 x 14 cm – (Colec. Tierra Firme)
Título original: A doença o sofrimento e a morte entram num bar. Uma espécie de manual de escrita humorística.
ISBN: 978-958-8249-40-7
1. Humorismo – Siglo XXI 2. Sátira 3. Literatura portuguesa –
Siglo XXI I. Pizarro, Jerónimo, tr. II. Ser. III. t.

Distribución en América y España
© 2018, Ediciones Fondo de Cultura Económica SAS Calle 11 No 5–60, Bogotá, Colombia www.fce.com.co

A partir de materiales etnográficos de campo, se describen diversas instancias de fenómenos que hacen reír a los chacobo (Pano) de la  Amazonía boliviana en contextos discursivos o prácticos como la caza, las fiestas, las relaciones interétnicas, las relaciones de parentesco, la onomástica o la mitología, y se propone una hipótesis sociológica de interpretación del humorismo chacobo.

Turkish German comedy culture and the lived realities of Turkish Muslims in Germany

Comedy entertainment is a powerful arena for serious public engagement with questions of German national identity and Turkish German migration. The German majority society and its largest labour migrant community have been asking for decades what it means to be German and what it means for Turkish Germans, Muslims of the second and third generations, to call Germany their home. Benjamin Nickl examines through the social pragmatics of humour the dynamics that underpin these questions in the still-evolving popular culture space of German mainstream humour in the 21st century. The first book-length study on the topic to combine close readings of film, television, literary and online comedy, and transnational culture studies, Turkish German Muslims and Comedy Entertainment presents the argument that Turkish German humour has moved from margin to mainstream by intervening in cultural incompatibility and Islamophobia discourse.

Ebook available in Open Access.
This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

La présente communication questionne, d'une part, les différents aspects multimodaux mobilisés par le film comique, considéré comme un outil de communication, pour rendre compte d'une partie de l'histoire d'une Afrique victime de ses politiques – acteurs et programmes. Le fictif et sa contrepartie réelle y sont, d'autre part, comparés par le truchement de trois supports filmiques 1 caractérisés par l'opposition générique fiction vs non-fiction. L'analyse s'intéresse spécifiquement au fonctionnement du discours de la dictature dans le comique – lequel s'enracine dans les vestiges de la colonisation – en se focalisant sur le prototype Bobo Babimbi (personnage de LCDB) fécondé à partir du dictateur Dadis Camara (GIMDC) et de l'archétype Mobutu (MRDZ). Elle met ainsi en évidence les mécanismes par lesquels l'histoire devient un objet de rire – pris dans le sens du risible et de la satire – dans le film de fiction. Ce faisant, ce dernier contribue à archiver l'histoire de la dictature africaine dont le décryptage exige un recours au concept de « mémoire discursive » développé par l'analyse du discours. Le discours de la dictature, désormais considéré comme un fait, est communiqué sous l'étoffe du rire.

Humor and things related (such as the category of the merry [veselost’]), played an unusually prominent role in what is often considered the first school of contemporary literary theory, Russian Formalism, or, to be specific, its Petrograd wing, mainly represented by Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, and Boris Eikhenbaum. Humor helped these Formalists in their battle against approaching literature from the standpoint of “psychologism”. The comic let them emphasize literature’s own agenda (centered round the interplay of its constructive elements, not only within a single work but also across history), at the cost of the “serious” authorial purpose, previously identified with the meaning of the work. In fact, an artistic breakthrough, the Formalists maintained, tends to be (taken as) humorous at the beginning, its “serious” explanations being a later development;
accordingly, the Formalists considered as the prototype of all novels the parodic works of Cervantes
and Sterne. Humor advanced Formalist theory, helping it take its eyes off the tenor of the work and see
the vehicle, off content and see the medium, which now was considered the true message. However,
when it came to their special theory of the comic, this approach threatened to deconstruct the literary
significance of humor in literature, humorous works no longer distinguishable from non-humorous
ones. Why this was so is analyzed in the forthcoming second part of this article, titled “Literature as a
Joke”.

Episode 3 of Unseen Academicals, examining the second book in the Witches Series, Wyrd Sisters (1988), and using it to explore theories of humour, the power of words, Shakespeare, the history of Macbeth, evolving depictions of witches, broomsticks, Black Aliss, vegetarian ghosts, and more!

Humour has constantly intrigued scholars and has been extensively analysed from disciplines as varied as anthropology, sociology, psychology, neuroscience or linguistics. Within this, it has received due attention from discourse and conversational analysts, semanticists, semioticians or pragmatists, for example. Researchers have looked into its manifold manifestations and a wide array of its fascinating, but often complex characteristics. Several models and theories have been proposed to account for this ever-present and ubiquitous phenomenon -suffice to mention the Semantic Script Theory of Humor or the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo and Raskin 1991), to name but two. Obviously, the post-Gricean, cognitive pragmatic framework of relevance theory Wilson 1986, 1995) could not be alien to the interest aroused by humour, so relevance theorists soon incorporated it into their research agendas. On the basis of this ground-breaking and revealing theory put forward thirty years ago by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, there have been many illuminating attempts to unravel how jokes, punning, monologues, ironies or sitcoms, among other types of humorous texts, work and achieve their effects (number of studies has not been accompanied so far by a unified, all-encompassing analysis of humour through the lens of relevance-theoretic pragmatics.

El Chigüire Bipolar articula lo cotidiano en un formato periodístico en un momento y lugar donde hacerlo es un verdadero riesgo. Su humor, re-trato y su pronunciación creativa informan efectivamente en un tiempo donde la cantidad y la calidad son definidas en términos higiénicos tales como la infodemia. El siguiente artículo consta en una formulación del mismo como tematización humorística e informe sobre la sociedad útil para las ciencias sociales. Por su naturaleza práctica se aborda desde el análisis crítico del discurso intermodal propuesto por Kress y Van Leeuwen aplicado por Rodríguez y Velázquez a las caricaturas. Se describe y analiza una publicación la cual tematiza como desde Venezuela, ante una situación común, es inevitable no pronunciar la ineptitud del gobierno bolivariano.

Organisateurs : LE CENTRE DE RECHERCHE SUR L’IMAGINAIRE. IMAGINES, LE CENTRE DE RÉUSSITE UNIVERSITAIRE,  en collaboration avec AGENCE UNIVERSITAIRE DE LA FRANCOPHONIE
THE ROMANIAN SOCIETY FOR ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES (RSEAS) et l'ALLIANCE FRANÇAISE DE PITEȘTI.
Les 14-16 juin 2019 à Pitesti (Roumanie)

The paper intends to track the naming criteria for dogs among the chané. Links between onomastics and diverse cultural contexts are thus analysed - such as the daily treatment and attitudes towards dogs, mythic symbolism, etymology, human names, names of domestic pets and taxonomic classification. In a comparative perspective, meaningful relationships are also verified with the dynamics of ethnic relationships and mythologies of Chaco ethnic groups.

Taking occasion from a recently published collective volume regarding laughter in the ancient Greek world (Wonderful Laughs: Laughter in Ancient Greek Literature, ed. M. I. Yossi – A. D. Melista, Athens, Smili Editions, 2017), this article surveys in a concise manner the most important aspects of the function of laughter in the literature and the society of antiquity. In particular, the investigation revolves around the use of ridicule and scorn in the major literary genres (Homeric epic, tragedy and comedy, rhetoric). The views of great ancient thinkers (Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Plutarch) with regard to the nature and morality of the laughable are also discussed. A number of specialized topics are examined, including the aggressive and satirical aspect of laughter, its presence in the context of ancient religion and ritual, the moralistic condemnation of laughter, and the attempt to restrict ridicule within the limits of gracious jesting and propriety.

This project starts with a lari. A street cart, very common in many urban contexts of India. This project begins by proposing alternatives to appropriate public spaces and offer resources to confront scarcity (while harnessing frugality). Is a proposal for moving markets; changing spaces we could dare to call moving homes.
This is a project of essential, minimum design, frugal prototyping and collaborative explorations. A project of learning and sharing that, almost coincidentally, results in enquiries of architectural theory. A proposition of methodologies based on the essential action of play; of participating, negotiating and, ultimately, changing the world with small, collective gestures. A ponder into issues of knowledge production in the global south, in parallel to a political initiative of decolonizing: decolonizing the mind by structuring our own methods of thought, capitalizing on our capabilities and rearranging our priorities as spatial agents.
This is an inquest into the technology of jugaad -an attitude of frugal improvisation and innovation widely used in India- which accounts for great possibilities of use in the field of design, of spatial practice. A reconsideration of reutilizing those existing thought+material processes, within our field of practice. A gap in that field, in which we can play.

This paper aims to show that our perception of time has a bearing on the comedic success of certain instances of moving image humour and explores how film and television makers exploit this perception for comedic affect. The object under examination here is effective comic timing in narrative moving images. My analysis of a corpus of comedic films and television episodes uncovers three notable trends including duration and length of events, juxtaposition of incongruously timed events, and juxtaposition of incongruously paced events.

Following Michael Polanyi’s conception of the learned community qua “society of explorers”, i.e., actual persons who are responsibly committed to the candid investigation of reality for the overall sake of the common good, we reconstruct and present hereby the varied and varying understanding of two major common-sense concepts in the history of Western culture: ‘humour’ and ‘cruelty’. On this exploration, we traverse a wide range of disciplinary fields, encompassing the humanities and the social sciences at large, albeit focussing upon philosophy and psychology in particular. Phenomena of interest are duly tracked, described, and discussed, according to the import that we deem they possess in terms of epistemic, ethical and existential value. The aim of our exploration is to produce a richer map of human thought, showing how the vast historical plurality of expert interpretations of these two concepts, and frequently underplayed intersections thereof, is no sheer frustrating ambiguity but, as it is eventually argued, the inevitable and even useful result of the polysemy inherent to all common-sense concepts. Michael Polanyi, once again, serves as our key reference-point in making this case.