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240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2019
where the audience is never in any doubt that the order so delightfully disrupted will be restored, perhaps even reinforced by this fleeting attempt to flout it, and thus can blend its anarchic pleasures with a degree of conservative self- satisfaction. As in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park or Dr Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat, we can wreak some gloriously irresponsible havoc while the parental figure is absent, but would be devastated to learn that he or she might never return.(12)Eagleton has a lot of sympathy for the Freudian notion that humour generally involves a "release" from superego-driven social constraints and the "exigencies of sense-making" of the Reality Principle. And if all morality is the result of the repression and sublimation of the unruly id, then humour results from "desublimation", from the temporary release from such pressures.
that the human species is something of a joke, not to be taken too seriously. Indeed, to contemplate it from a seat in the gods, so to speak, may give rise to a sense of squalid farce, as it does with that gloomiest of philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer. For all his lugubrious cast of mind, Schopenhauer finds it impossible to suppress a snort of incredulous laughter at the sight of these pathetic insects known as human beings – what he calls ‘this world of constantly needy creatures who continue for a time merely by devouring one another, pass their existence in anxiety and want, and often endure terrible afflictions, until they fall at last into the arms of death’. There is no grand goal to this ‘battle- ground of tormented and agonised beings’, only ‘momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure conditioned by wants, much and long suffering, constant struggle, bellum omnium, everything a hunter and everything hunted, pressure, want, need and anxiety, shrieking and howling; and this goes on in saecula saeculorum or until once again the crust of the planet breaks’.(45)Chapter 3 deals with the Incongruity Theory, that humour arises from the out-of-place, the disharmonious, and inappropriate—or in the immortal words of Immanuel Kant,
a sudden shift of the mind, first to one and then to another point of view for considering its object, there can correspond an alternating tension and relaxation of the elastic portions of the intestines which communicates itself to our diaphragm’(69)This chapter felt the most unfocused and disorganised in the book, however, and my energy for the book fell to a bit of a low ebb when TE rebounded in Chapter 4 "Humour and History", a real scorcher of a tour through the rise of "Good Humour" out of the depths of the puritan mid-1600s to feature in the genial bonhomie (of novelists like Henry Fielding and philosophers Francis Hutcheson and the Earl of Shaftesbury), in the cult of sensibility/sentimentality (of the likes of Laurence Sterne and Charles Dickens), and in "shafts" of that most aristocratic of forms of humour, wit (e.g. in the aphoristic-like poems of Alexander Pope and the plays and apothegms of Oscar Wilde).
Nothing is more instantly communicative, Hutcheson remarks, than a good joke. The joke is now a metaphor for a whole set of amicable social relations, and as such is a profoundly political utterance. If it is an earthly version of divine caritas, it is also the prototype of a more companionable society. The world, as Laurence Sterne reminds us, is big with jest, of which his own literary art is one of the many midwives; and for an author like Hutcheson, what this pregnant planet it is labouring to deliver is a more comradely social order. It is a republic of free and equal citizens that the bonhomie of the club or dinner table prefigures. In the fourth volume of Tristram Shandy, Sterne speaks of his ambition to construct ‘a kingdom of hearty laughing subjects’. To laugh together is to share a bodily as well as spiritual communion, one whose closest analogy is a festive meal. In this unity of the physical and mental, laughter is a refutation of Cartesian dualism. There is no point to this reciprocity beyond its own self- delight, which is why it has a certain affinity with art. Humour of this kind is an implicit critique of instrumental rationality. It exists purely for the joy of the contact.(114-15)One other book I immediately rushed out (OK, to Amazon.ca) and bought was the collected Plays (vol 1) of the Mancunian leftie Trevor Griffiths, whose irresistible play Comedianstakes up much of the exegesis of the otherwise deflationary final chapter. "That's it? Nothing on the 20C? No Brecht?" I whined. "Where's the Prolegomenon to a First Critique of Stewart Lee" I thought the introduction promised me? Instead, TE moves from Griffiths to an odd recounting of Christianity as a bad joke, ending with: "There is also a vein of comédie noire in Christianity. God sends his only son to save us from our plight, and how do we show our gratitude? We kill him! It is an appalling display of bad manners."