Abstract
This chapter focuses on that which I believe is missed or compromised when humor is not taken seriously and considered a genuine human capacity. I begin by showing that although laughter is likely to have evolved from play signals of primates, humor is a distinctively human phenomenon that involves the ability to enjoy cognitive shifts and appreciate ambiguities and incongruities. Next, I compare humor to other ways of knowing and understanding and show that it provides us with unique insights about human existence. I then illustrate the uniqueness of humor by focusing on the type of jokes that point to a truth about human existence. Here, I attempt to provide a provisional answer to the question: why do jokes that highlight some fundamental fact of our existence seem to be so appealing to us? The last part of this chapter explores the educational significance of the type of humor that is directed at making fun of human existence.
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Notes
- 1.
See Kant’s selection from Critique of Judgment, in The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, ed. John Morreall, (Albany: SUNY Press 1987), p. 46.
- 2.
This quote is taken from http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Bertrund_Russell.
- 3.
These jokes were brought to my attention by Ted Cohen in his book Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
- 4.
Cohen 1999, p. 43.
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Gordon, M. (2014). Humor, Truth, and Human Existence. In: Humor, Laughter and Human Flourishing. SpringerBriefs in Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00834-9_2
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