Jokes are a laughing matter

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 61, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 5-15

  Kivy, Peter ^a  

^a RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049154533     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1540-6245.00087     Document Type: Review

References (14)

1. Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 10
2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), pp. 74-75 (§ 19 and § 20)
3. There is another echo of Kant in the notion that being funny is highly subjective, and yet we want to say "the joke is funny, as if it were an objective matter" (Cohen, Jokes, p. 31). Clearly this reminds us of Kant's claim in the "Analytic of the Beautiful" that we treat beauty as if it were an objective quality, all the while acknowledging that it is not
4. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 200
5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), p. 32
6. Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, p. 135
7. For an account of the rise, fall, and rise again of the concept of group evolution, see Elliot Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Harvard University Press, 1998), esp. part 1
8. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1917), p. 2
9. Cohen, Jokes, p. 60
10. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, with Reflections Upon Laughter, ed. Peter Kivy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 16 and 17
11. I owe this joke to Phylis Goldstein
12. On the occasion of my giving an earlier version of this paper at the American Society for Aesthetics, I was told by a man whose name I cannot now remember that there is a "born again" Southern Baptist version of this joke. The punch-line is: "One of the churches I worship in, the other I used to worship in." You can reconstruct the rest of the joke from that
13. I am grateful to Noël Carroll for suggesting this point to me and prompting me to develop it
14. The present paper is a revised and enlarged version of a paper presented at the fifty-seventh annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, in 1999. It was originally a set of comments on Ted Cohen's Jokes, prepared for a symposium on it. My co-symposiasts were Ted Cohen, Timothy Gould, and Robert Solomon. I am grateful to them all for helpful comments, as I am to Noël Carroll, who also urged me to reread Bergson on laughter, which I had not looked into since I was an undergraduate