From: Robert Owen (rowen@technologist.com)
Date: Mon Oct 18 1999 - 01:40:48 MDT
Sasha Chislenko wrote:
> It suggests that humor is a reaction to semantic exceptions.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Sasha Chislenko <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>
An analysis by Kierkegaard yielded a similar result. If we assume
that the ultimate basis for "rationality" as WE understand it is the
"Law of Contradiction", then any violation of this law that has
a wierd appearance of reasonability which is immediately followed
by a detection of the contradiction will provoke that peculiar
"ambivalent" response we call "laughter". It is as if for a moment
we were in Wonderland and then, to our relief, we find we are
on the right side of the mirror. Irony, satire, burlesque and cari-
cature may be seen as subsets.
For example, "A German joke is no laughing matter" as in the
"Witz" in which a wife stabs her husband for spilling the sugar,
who later tells the doctor: "It only hurts when I laugh."
Or [no disrespect intended] "An Old Maid is someone who every
night looks under her bed to make sure the thing she wants most
isn't there."
Or the man who is fooled by his companion into believing that he
can walk on water as long as the latter shines his flashlight on
the water where the former is walking; but, inspired by logic the
fool says: "Don't take me for an idiot. I'll get halfway across and
you'll turn out the light!"
Well, in every case what is initially and speciously rational provokes
an anxious search to find some error, and when discovered, the
relief is expressed as a strange spastic sort of exhalation. You see,
Occidentals rest their sense of ego-integrity on the belief that the
World is, beneath all appearances to the contrary, really logical --
things DO make sense after all.
Bob
=======================
Robert M. Owen
Director
The Orion Institute
57 W. Morgan Street
Brevard, NC 28712-3659 USA
=======================
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:05:32 MST