The Mental Tickle of Humor
Donnelly, Francis P.
603 THE MENTAL TICKLE OF HUMOR By FRANCIS P. DONNELLY A PHILOSOPHICAL expert has enunciated the maxim: Civilization varies as the amount of soap used—COcS. In these days, however,...
...it is a function of cognitive life, it is the conscious realization of the perfection of our being...
...Gregory, who would probably accept the proposed amendment, finds laughter a relief...
...Aristotle analyzes the art of apprehending humor and states that most witticisms are from metaphor and from deception, and that the knowledge of the listener is all the clearer because he expected the opposite...
...In his view, we do not weep because we are sad, but we are sad because we weep...
...and so satire becomes the weapon of the civilized...
...The wide application and important consequences of this historic generalization may be left to others, especially to those who are exercised over the obscure problem of what constitutes progress, but here and now the pressing question is, What are the reasons for the amendment...
...the lips of hunger resemble the lips of laughter...
...All animals and all men, if normal, have developed appetites...
...Comedy is foolishness...
...Soap is cosmopolitan...
...it remains on the surface...
...The reflection in the mirror is there all at once and full, if the mirror is polished clean...
...Humor is more akin to beauty and to truth than to good...
...If the clown were in reality as foolish as he acts, there would be pain and not pleasure...
...we see the point...
...The most obvious thing about humor is the laugh...
...Greig, whose book on humor has a complete bibliography on the subject, the finest anthology of definitions and the most utter fatuity, is a theorist of the age of Freud and by a vigorous but not a most ennobling imagination brings laughter back to tickling and tickling back to the slough of sex...
...Laughter is not the right approach to the true nature of humor...
...So, I suppose, we do not laugh because we see a joke, but we see a joke because we laugh...
...Were insolence strong and uncouth, it would use its staff, but it is weak, and blood is messy, so it uses a laugh...
...The mind seems to say, "Really, so it is...
...In these days, however, of standardized production, of patent packages, scientific salesmanship and universal hygiene, soap has lost its diagnostic powers as a test of civilization...
...Modern behaviorists made first the baby and now the beast the measure of man...
...Autosuggestion puts into practice some such principle, and a good working definition of humor is that given by one upon whom a practical joke was played...
...Eastman, who thinks that humor is an instinct—blessed word for harassed thinkers—is also interested in baby laughter...
...He calls the laughable a mistake (hamartema) both in the Poetics and in his Rhetoric...
...Now you may laugh...
...It is, in fact, in knowledge that Aristotle puts the pleasure of humor as he places there the pleasure of art...
...Is Aristotle dealing in paradoxes...
...we are not dense...
...James, the perfect pragmatist, insists so much upon effects that for him the effect becomes the cause...
...Appetite is the object of direction, not of education as is humor...
...The appetite begins at zero, increases to maximum, slakes its craving, and goes back to zero...
...He would seem to say to Plato, "Yes, there is deception and error in humor, there is ugliness or incongruity, but it is painless and virtuous...
...and, in the 604 Rhetoric, itis educated superiority or insolence (hybris...
...For him, in his Poetics, humor is painless incongruity...
...We understand the joke...
...Surprise, novelty, instantaneousness, deception, incongruity, they are all attributes of humor...
...Aristotle answers that scoffing and buffoonery are the vicious excess of humor...
...These are the phrases applied when we come in contact with humor...
...Not by measuring the velocity and volume of falling tears, not by distilling their salt, do we reach the nature of sorrow...
...and therefore your first suckle is your first chuckle, although the perfect smile is of later development...
...Besides, comedy on the stage and in life is based on ignorance, says Plato in the Philebus, and, worse than that, laughter is the vice of envy, rejoicing in the evil of others...
...Say, if you will, that laughter goes back to a tickle, but does it go back to a mere bodily tickle...
...The rest of us unsatirical do not always laugh at others— we mostly laugh with them...
...A profounder and better measure of civilization is humor —C\gaH...
...That might give hysteria or idiocy...
...He should head the bureau of census and statistics, but should not be allowed to draw inferences...
...No one in the secret was near when the joke was sprung, so the victim protested, "It was no joke...
...After all, soap has no depth...
...A well-fed baby looks contented and happy...
...Sex is no sign of civilization...
...Plato, according to Lafontaine in Lc Plaisir d'apres Platon et Aristote, was the first Puritan...
...humor is a flash —sudden, thrilling, complete...
...Ugliness transferred to art becomes an object of pleasure, by its artistic representation...
...If deception remained, there would be a real mistake, and that would be painful...
...Indeed, all art in Aristotle's teaching is a virtue of the mind, even the art of joking, and it is precisely because of the excellence of humor that superiority uses laughter against its foe...
...He is behavioristic and makes laughter a snarl sweetened and disentangled by as many million years of evolution as may be necessary...
...Thinkers argued that if they surprised the secret of laughter, they would have tracked humor to its lair...
...There is deception in humor, but it is deception undeceived...
...he calls it ugliness (aischon) the opposite of beauty (kallos...
...Mirth is a virtue for Aristotle—eutrapelia—the golden mean between clownishness, the excess, and boorishness, the defect...
...Greek philosophers made man, or rather mankind, the measure of man...
...Pleasure is activity...
...The tickle of humor is mental...
...Appetite is a fire...
...Humor has the transfiguring power of art...
...Find out where the pleasure lies in humor, and you are as close to surprising its secret as you are to understanding anything in life...
...What bloom is to youth, pleasure is to action— its perfection and its completion...
...there was nobody there to laugh...
...Greig would not support the amendment...
...they all do not seem to have a sense of humor...
...Plato is the originator of the idea that humor is the offspring of superiority and that the first laugh was derision...
...The mask is Aristotle's example, and it illustrates perfectly the two commonest elements of all humor, deception and incongruity, and their painlessness, because the mind in reality finds that both deception and ugliness are bogies...
...Sully pursued laughter down the avenues of years and dated carefully the first, the dawning smile of babyhood...
...The joy of humor is more like the pleasure of getting an answer to a mathematical problem or of solving a puzzle than of eating a meal or gratifying any appetite...
...they all point to the mind...
...With that knowledge, which is truth sharpened on the edge of contrast, "because the mind expected the opposite," comes the pleasure of humor...
...Laughter is separable from humor, but pleasure is not...
...What, then, is pleasure...
...There is incongruity in humor, but, like the ugly mask of comedy when put on the stage, it amuses and does not disgust, or it is seen to be a mask, not a real face...
...The mental nature of humor is evidenced widely...
...Art for him was the shadow of a shadow, the copy of nature which was the copy of the Idea...
...I made a mistake...
...Much may be said for such a theory...
...The maxim should be amended...
...As art is noble playing of the mind, so too is humor a healthy playing of the mind...
Vol. 5 • April 1927 • No. 22
