Band 2, Heft 1

This article offers a pragmatist approach to concentration camp humor, in particular, to Viktor Frankl’s and Primo Levi’s conceptualizations of humor. They both show how humor does not vanish even in the worst imaginable circumstances. Despite this similarity, it will be argued that their intellectual positions on humor differ significantly. The main difference between the two authors is that according to Frankl, humor is elevating in the middle of suffering, and according to Levi, humor expresses the absurdity of the idea of concentration camps, but this is not necessarily a noble reaction. Through a critical synthesis based on pragmatist philosophy, it will be claimed that humor in concentration camps expresses the human condition in the entirely twisted situation. This phenomenon cannot be understood without considering forms of life, how drastic the changes from the past were, and what people expected from the future, if anything.

In his article “Notes on the Sight Gag” from 1991, the philosopher Noël Carroll proposed a taxonomy of sight gags that recur throughout the genre of comedian comedy in cinema. This article revisits and augments Carroll’s taxonomy by analyzing the sight gags found in the films of Jacques Tati (1907-1982). Tati worked in a very different context than that of the silent Hollywood filmmakers from whose comic films Carroll largely derives his categories. He began making films in the sound era, and five of his six feature films were made in color. As a French filmmaker, he also sought to adapt the genre of comedian comedy in cinema to his culturally specific concerns. This article shows that he drew on at least three of the types of sight gag identified by Carroll. But he modified some of them and innovated several other kinds.

While the role of the comic in Søren Kierkegaard’s thought has been thoroughly studied by diverse scholars, in this paper I will ask whether humor in Kierkegaard’s religious sphere amounts to seduction or to temptation. By “seduction” I will mean a luring that can be viewed as positive or neutral, whereas by “temptation” I mean a negative seduction that takes advantage of the tempted fool, leaving him empty-handed. Irony, comic jest and humor are existential categories in Kierkegaard’s three spheres of existence. Irony and comic jest play a seductive role and can be regarded as neutral or even positive. In the religious sphere, humor can be assessed as temptation. Kierkegaard humorously lures the one who wishes to believe. With humor, one is readying oneself for a leap of faith. The leap may fail; one can fall, crash, and be left empty-handed.

Studying the funny trends within historically marginalized populations has historically been used as a means of making them seem nonthreatening to dominant cultures. Scholars, furthermore, have often applied dominant-culture contexts toward reading minority artifacts without taking the time to understand the premises for other cultures’ funny enthymemes (Epp 2010; Price 1994). This paper proposes two solutions to the dilemma of recognizing the importance of representing marginalized populations’ humor in the scholarly canon but also studying those funny artifacts with a mind toward ethics, using Native American humor as a representative case study.

This paper explores the current obstacles that a cognitive theory of humor faces. More specifically, I argue that the nebulous and ill-defined nature of humor makes it difficult to tell what counts as clear instances of, and deficits in, the phenomenon.Without getting clear on this, we cannot identify the underlying cognitive mechanisms responsible for humor. Moreover, being too quick to draw generalizations regarding the ubiquity of humor, or its uniqueness to humans, without substantially clarifying the phenomenon and its occurrences is not only unwise but can actually be a detriment to our study of humor. As such, these sorts of claims must be resisted. I conclude the paper by pointing the way forward to addressing these obstacles.

The present study explores the construction of humor in internet memes along two dimensions. The external dimension is concerned with humor in internet memes as opposed to verbal humor on the one hand and as opposed to humor in comics and caricatures on the other. The perceptive differences, stemming from the workings of the human memory, and the medium are posited as the two main differentiating factors. On the internal dimension, we explore manifestations of humor in light of the communicative situation and taxonomic relations at both the intermedial and intramedial levels of internet memes, taking as an example a family of You Wouldn’t Get It image macros. Our analysis employs elements of intertextuality theory and the notion of orders of indexicality. The study aims to contribute to the growing theoretical and methodological framework for multifactorial analyses of internet memes.

This paper is a critical interpretation of the role of laughter in the work of Agnes Heller. Following the distinction between innate affect and culturally conditioned emotion, Heller argues that laughter is an affect that comes as the expressive reaction to the hiatus between the social and the natural. As such, laughter is ubiquitous and yet remains ultimately undefinable, because it signifies the unbridgeable gap between the two worlds that we inhabit at the same time. Laughter thus sonorously presents our human condition as expressible yet not graspable according to a single theory of laughter (superiority, relief, incongruity, and ambivalence, as defined by D. H. Monro), or any combination thereof. Paraphrasing Immanuel Kant, laughter is ultimately the instinct of reason that liberates us from the illusion that a resolution between the two conflicting constituents of our existence is ultimately possible.

Philosophy’s richness comes in part from the wide range of conceptual frameworks from which meaning can be made of aspects of the world. Philosophy can be done from feminist, Marxist, positivist, or Freudian standpoints. The difference in the sorts of analyses produced by these different approaches can be tricky to explain to undergraduates. Contained here are short explanations of the nature of a collection of these frameworks and a fun example of each, an analysis of the chicken crossing the road joke to be used to give undergraduates a sense of the breadth of philosophical methodology.