Clowns in the Woods — Jonathan Weidenbaum

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

I am a longtime instructor in world religions, philosophy, and ethics in the NYC area. I present and publish on topics in the philosophy of religion, classical American philosophy, phenomenology and embodiment, and (surprise!) the philosophy of humor.

What is your understanding of "humour" proper; or, at least, of those features thereof to which you have paid the keenest attention? And how does your work merge with, or is influenced by, your quotidian encounters with a potentially ubiquitous and ambiguous phenomenon such as humour? 

I do not know, and may never know, why we laugh—among other questions surrounding humor and the comic. And this is fine. There is something to be said for participating in a quest for what is a challenge to even define, let alone theorize about.

This doesn’t mean I hold that no progress has been made in the philosophy of humor. It was an old friend from graduate school who not only first conscripted me to this area of philosophy, but also introduced me to John Morreall’s Taking Laughter Seriously. Previously, the mystery of why we laugh was something I’d throw at the students in a course of mine on philosophies of mind. A good deal of my own research explores the felt-patterns involved in intense aesthetic and spiritual experience—a highly specific area within the philosophy of religion. The dynamics at work in the main theories of humor—the build-up of tension followed by a release, the juxtaposition or succession of contrasting elements or states of being—perfectly fit my work in the phenomenology of spiritual experience. Ever since this revelation (an aptly chosen term, for sure), the sheer extent of the overlap between humor and religion, from Hasidic literature to the pseudonymous writings of Kierkegaard, has come as no surprise whatsoever.

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? 

Looking at my previous work, I have given the superiority theory of humor too little attention, and have even dismissed as shallow the idea of humor as a means of ridiculing others. Looking at my own life, I now ask why. Truth be told, I enjoy roasts and insult comics far more than other forms of humor. Many of my most enjoyable relationships, whether with friends, family, or even my favorite students, are replete with barbed comments and affectionate jabs. I now suspect the presence of a kind of shared energy between cruelty and comedic talent, such that the removal of the one would only diminish the other. Moving from humor to creativity in general: I am reminded of the Ludovico Technique from A Clockwork Orange, wherein the loss of Alex’s capacity for ultra-violence leads, as an unintended side-effect, to the destruction of his appreciation for music (Beethoven’s soaring Ninth in the Stanley Kubrick film). A quick disclaimer: I am not claiming one has to be a raging sociopath in order to tell a good joke. But I certainly concur with the authors you mention that cruelty will always find a way back into human life. And even if the attempt to eliminate it were successful, this would come with a terrible price.

While I have hitherto avoided the connection between laughter and cruelty toward human beings, I have addressed humor in relation to the darker and more precarious side of life. In an essay on the relevance of William James for humor—which begins with the fact that James claimed to have fully grasped Hegel only while on nitrous oxide—I concentrate on how an open and pluralistic cosmos, one exceeding all our attempts to close off a final understanding of things, can be as funny as it is frightening. In this same essay I make use of Noël Carroll’s “Horror and Humor,” in which he proposes that what scares us and what makes us laugh both transgress our conceptual categories. To borrow a central example of Carroll’s, a clown is both a human and yet not quite a human. The dividing line between fright and laughter depends on the extent to which that which shakes up our categories appears to threaten us. While a clown eyeing us from the woods at night projects a sense of menace, thus evoking horror, the clown at a circus exudes harmlessness, and provides us entertainment. 

Are there two or three works that have fueled your philosophical and literary production, and 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?

I already mentioned John Morreall’s Taking Laughter Seriously, but I would like to add John Dewey’s Art as Experience and William James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism.

Allow me to explain why.

An old high school friend of mine once claimed that every time he got stoned and entered a gas station or a 7-Eleven, the very same box of praline cookies would jump out at him—as if it were sitting and waiting in the shadows, hiding until the right opportunity to leap on stage and shine. For months after he told me this, I could not walk into a convenience store of any kind without perceiving these exact cookies, and all the more frequently when I strove to cut down on sweets. Now, my friend is not a stand-up comic, just a naturally funny person with a knack for seeing those dimensions of life most overlook.

A good comic is precisely one who is keenly attentive to experience. John Dewey, in fact, argues that the arts, even at their most refined, are on a continuum with the more heightened and realized of our ordinary experiences. “To esthetic experience, then,” he proclaims toward the end of Art as Experience, “the philosopher must go to understand what experience is.” Comedy is not exactly front and center among Dewey’s examples of the arts, although he doesn’t quite ignore it either. The point is that authors who focus on the textures of our everyday perception are the most pertinent to theorizing about humor.  

In his posthumously published Essays in Radical Empiricism, William James lists “comicality” as one example of an affectional fact—a quality that completely defies the subject-object split running through so much Western thought since Descartes. To begin with a vivid example other than humor: consider walking into the snack aisle of a 7-Eleven with the munchies. We can say, with equal justice, that we feel a temptation for that box of praline cookies, or that a box of praline cookies is tempting us. As an affectional fact, the temptation here permeates the entire scenario, and is isolatable neither within an experiencing mind nor within an experienced object. Turning to humor: recall the train of visual jokes in a classic Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker film (think of any extended scene from The Naked Gun). Where, precisely, is the humor found—or “comicality” as James labels it? We can claim that we experience the funny in Leslie Nielsen’s bumbling presence throughout the film, or that Nielsen’s antics are simply funny—and either way of stating it is acceptable. Classical American philosophy is a treasure trove of these kinds of phenomenological insights, and I suggest that such penetrating analyses of experience have much to tell us about the nature of jokes and laughter. 

References

Carroll, Noël. 1999. “Horror and Humor.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (2): 145–60.

Dewey, John. (1934) 2005. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Books.

James, William. 1996. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Kubrick, Stanley, dir. 1971. A Clockwork Orange. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros.

Morreall, John. 1983. Taking Laughter Seriously. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Zucker, David, dir. 1988. The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures.