The Ludicrous World — Don Nilsen

A scholar and a teacher: Tell us briefly about yourself and your work.

I was raised on a farm in Utah where I spoke “farmer language.” I knew that my ticket off the farm was to learn standard English, so I studied standard English grammar; then I studied linguistics; and then I studied Irony, Satire, Sarcasm, Parody, Paradox, and Language Play.

What is your understanding of "humour" proper; or, at least, of those features thereof to which you have paid the keenest attention?

When two people are communicating with each other, it’s very possible for them to start arguing with each other. Each person is trying to convince the other person that he is right and the other person is wrong. But when two people are using genuine humor, then they tend to see things from more than a single point of view. They also start looking for common ground, because humor only works when each person can see the world through the other person’s eyes.

Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Judith Shklar, and Derrida have argued that cruelty is baffling because, even if we want to eliminate it from human life, it always finds a way to re-emerge therein, almost as if it were part and parcel of the same human life. Has cruelty ever played a significant role in your work's purview, and/or your understanding of social and cultural phenomena?

There is indeed a whole genre variously called “Gallows Humor,” “Dark Humor,” or “Cringe Humor.” But I don’t view Gallows Humor as truly cruel. Consider Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, or John Irving’s The World According to Garp, or Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. These novels are not satires, mind you, because a satire is judgmental. A satire, like Jonathan Swift’s  Gulliver’s Travels, has a point of view that the author wants the reader to see, and even follow. But Gallows Humor is not judgmental. It sees the world as ironic or ridiculous, or ludicrous, but that’s the way the world is. Period. And sometimes an author will write both a bitter satire, and a non-bitter satire. Consider George Orwell’s 1984 vs. Animal Farm, or Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal vs. Gulliver’s Travels, or Mark Twain’s War Prayer vs. Innocents Abroad.

Are there two or three works that, when it comes to addressing any of the themes fuelling my own philosophical and literary production, you would describe as true "classics" and, therefore, advise the reader of this blog to familiarise themselves with — the way, say, Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's Prince can be said to be "classics" in politics? And are there any works from the past ten years that you would equally recommend?

I would recommend reading about Aristotle's Schemes and Tropes. I would also recommend reading about Victor Raskin’s Script Model Grammar, because Script Model Grammar allows to analyze and generate not only sentences, but also paragraphs, chapters, and larger scripts. A television program has a script. A play has a script. And it is the script that defines the television program or the play. Script Model Grammar was designed to explain joke structures, because jokes are miniature discourses. But Salvatore Attardo, Christian Hemplemann, Willibald Ruch, and others are now using Script Model Grammar to explain larger scripts, such as novels, trilogies, and sagas, such as J. K. Rolling’s books about Harry Potter and Hogwarts.

P.S. Visit the website of the International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS), which Don Nilsen co-founded with Alleen Nilsen: http://www.humorstudies.org/