Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Briefly, Gaiman (the author) pithily describes a joke as any passage containing as necessary
(but for obvious reasons, not sufficient) elements a truth and an exaggeration. More
generally, psycho-sociologically speaking, theories of humour have converged around
incongruity, namely, that we find funny situations which appear strange. Perhaps
immodestly, we think that we can explain humourous situations by their coherence with
these theories. Thus, according to Morreall, we laugh when we feel superior, when we feel
relief, or when we feel pleasantly amused by the incongruous. For example, we would
probably laugh if a giant pumpkin appeared in our bathtub (but not if it were a cougar).
While there is some evidence that certain species of animals display their feelings of
amusement by laughter, or perhaps proto-laughter, it is not clear whether these animal
species would, on experiencing superiority, relief or incongruity, engage in a display of
amusement in line with these theories. The difficulty here is not with the theories
themselves, but with their application: we run again into the core issue which Nagel treats,
viz, that concepts of superiority, relief and incongruity are complex and sociologically
informed, so that these concepts almost certainly mean different things between species
inter se. As Wittgenstein put it, if a lion could speak, we could not understand him. Accepting
therefore that even if the bear might be capable of complex thought and self-awareness,
and even if the bear could conceivably display amusement in language or as behavior
intelligible solely to his own kind, there is however no shared mode between the bear
species and our species by which we can comprehend such a display. Accordingly, we
cannot even begin to apply our own intuition to determine the presence of humour in the
bears understanding. As an example, the bear might point to something with a claw and say
to another bear, in his own way, thats beary funny, and they might share a giggle.
However, for us this is not even bad humour, this is strictly unintelligible. Put the other way
around, there is no syntactical sentence, much less any joke, which we could put in words to
the bear, even if the bear spoke the language, by which the bear could understand our
meaning (much less our humour), no matter how eloquent we might be.
Thus, even if the bear could have a sense of humour, it would be a bears sense alone,
and more significantly, there would be nothing humanly intelligible (or humourous) about it.
Das Leben ist werth gelebt zu werden, sagt die Kunst, die schnste Verfhrerin; das Leben is
werth, erkannt zu werden, sagt die Wissenschaft - Nietzsche.
Life is worth living, says art, the most beautiful seductress; life is worth knowing, says science.