On Humour

by Critchley; Simon

• ISBN13: 9780415251211
• ISBN10: 0415251214
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-05-31
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

On Humouris a fascinating and beautifully written book on what philosophy can tell us about humor and about what it is to be human. Simon Critchley probes some of the most perennial features of humor, such as our tendency to laugh at animals and our bodies, why we mock death with comedy and why we think it's funny when people start to act like machines. He also looks as the darker side of humor, as when rife with sexism and racism, and shows how humor might remind us of people we would rather not be. Above all, Simon Critchley argues that humor can tell us much about the human condition, the meaning of life and why comedy itself begins in philosophy.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(24)
Three Theories of Humour	2	(1)
The Phenomenology of a Joke	3	(3)
Comic Timing	6	(1)
Laughter as an Explosion Expressed With the Body	7	(2)
Changing the Situation	9	(2)
Reactionary Humour	11	(1)
Structured Full	12	(2)
Jokes: Good, Bad and Gulliver	14	(2)
Laughter's Messianic Power	16	(2)
Sensus and Dissensus Communis	18	(2)
Tristram Shandy, or Back to the Things Themselves	20	(5)
Is Humour Human?	25	(16)
Eccentric Humans	27	(2)
A Small Bestiary	29	(2)
Horace and Juvenal, Urbanity and Disgust	31	(3)
Outlandish Animals	34	(2)
Kant's Parrot	36	(5)
Laughing at Your Body - Post-Colonal Theory	41	(14)
Being and Having	42	(1)
Physics and Metaphysics	43	(2)
Our Souls, Arseholes	45	(2)
Peditology	47	(3)
The Black Sun at the Centre of the Comic Universe	50	(5)
The Laughing Machine - a Note on Bergson and Wyndham Lewis	55	(10)
A Cabbage Reading Flaubert - Now That's Funny	58	(1)
How Humour Begins in Philosophy	59	(6)
Foreigners are Funny - the Ethicity and Ethnicity of Humour	65	(14)
The Universal and the Particular	66	(2)
Ethos and Ethnos	68	(3)
There was a Frenchman, an Englishman and an Irishman...	71	(2)
Having the Courage of our Parochialism	73	(2)
Comic Repression	75	(4)
The Joke's on All of Us - Humour as Sensus Communis	79	(14)
Shaftesbury's Reasonable Raillery	80	(3)
Disenchantment of Folly or Democratization of Wit?	83	(2)
Intersubjective Assent	85	(1)
Jokes as Everyday Anamnesis	86	(1)
Anaesthesia of the Heart	87	(1)
The Phenomenology of Phenomenology	88	(5)
Why the Super-Ego is Your Amigo - My Sense of Humour and Freud's	93	(20)
Finding Oneself Ridiculous	94	(2)
Subject as Abject Object	96	(2)
Melancholy Philosophers	98	(1)
Manic Intoxication	99	(2)
Humour as Anti-Depressant	101	(1)
Super-Ego I and II	102	(2)
Ideal Sickness	104	(1)
Laughter I and II	105	(2)
Smiling - the Mind's Mime	107	(2)
The Risus Purus	109	(4)
Notes	113	(8)
Bibliography	121	(4)
Thanks	125	(2)
Index	127