In this elegant little book, Ted Cohen provides some analytic reflections
on jokes and their role in human life. Appropriately, he adopts a style
that suits his subject. Although he uses the tools of analytic philosophy
better than many, his writing is personal and familiar, as well as rigorous.
I highly recommend this book as an excellent example of how to do philosophy
that is at once serious and light in touch. It is readable, full of insightful
analysis and sensitive to the constraints of philosophical analysis applied
to a topic that requires delicate handling. He also includes many excellent
jokes.

Cohen sees the making of jokes as a skill, and their telling as a performance.
We can plan to make jokes, have a contest to make jokes about Americans,
for instance; we can create genres, such as elephant jokes, or add to existing
kinds in new ways. Often jokes arise from current news items: thus there
are jokes about every President, about topics such as global warming and
even about AIDS. The horror of some topics is made bearable by joking about
them: jokes about death allow us to live with this common human fate by
seeing it in the light of the absurd.

Cohen encourages readers to ask themselves such questions as: Why is
this joke funny? If you don’t find it funny, do you understand the joke,
and think someone else might find it funny? Does it matter if you are offended
by the joke (or any joke)? If so, why? If you find my joke unfunny, but
can’t explain why, can I just ignore your discomfort as subjective? He
provides the outlines of answers to many such questions, and gives a central
role to jokes told in a community. To Cohen, the importance of jokes lies
in the role they play in human lives. We understand jokes only when we
share an appropriate background with the joke’s teller. If we lack relevant
understanding, then even if someone explains the joke, we still can’t find
it spontaneously funny. One needs, for instance, to know about scarecrows,
and also recognise the ambiguity of ‘outstanding in a field’ to understand
this joke:

 

A scarecrow won a prize: for being outstanding in his field.

The needed background may be factual: specialised knowledge or belief
yields a class of jokes that Cohen calls ‘hermetic’. A good example is
one that only philosophers get first time, as it requires knowledge of
a famous idea of Nelson Goodman’s:

 

A goy is a person who is a girl if examined at any time
up to and including t, and a boy if examined at any time after t.

Within this class also fall those cases that require knowledge of
common assumptions, such as the general beliefs about Jews that inform
many Jewish jokes.

Other jokes secure their effect as a result of shared
attitudes.
This factor in jokes Cohen calls ‘affective’, where success depends upon
the audience being amused, not on their having knowledge. The affective
background relates to what Cohen calls intimacy, normally unnoticed feelings
of community shared between joker and the audience. Jokes reinforce intimacy
in a community: we share the humour of a joke when we feel the same way
about something. This aspect of jokes is central to his analysis of the
nature of jokes, although he eschews any attempt to give a general ‘theory’
of jokes or their purpose.

This kind of fellow feeling is a more complex matter than one might
think. It is not just because we are social creatures, who want to reinforce
our sense of community. When I tell a joke, I need reassurance that (p.31)
“this something inside me, the something that is tickled by a joke, is
indeed something that constitutes an element of my humanity.” Equally,
when you and I don’t laugh at the same jokes, this is disturbing in a way
that goes beyond mere verbal misunderstanding, or sceptical possibilities.
Some jokes are asymmetrical, and may be used to test the degree of intimacy
with another, or impolitely to humiliate another who fails the ‘test’ of
shared understanding. To tell a joke where you do not ‘share’ the intimate
background is to be guilty of a degree of dishonesty or worse (p. 35).

Cohen treats at some length of the question whether the divinity of
the Old Testament possesses a sense of humour, and concludes that he encourages
laughter, as is noticed in the story of Abraham and Sarah, and also in
the Talmud. Spiritual aspects of Jewish humour are sanctioned at the highest
levels, while humour is a way humans can deal with the absurd, the oppressive
and the dreadful, so that they go on with the business of living.

In the final chapter, Cohen distances himself from contemporary attitudes
to moral theory, which he views as inclined to reduce to theories complex
matters requiring full human response in a way that distracts from real
moral thinking. His remarks here suggest a very interesting series of reflections,
but to consider them at length would be beyond the scope of this review.

Cohen’s attention is restricted to jokes made by non-philosophers. There
are however a few jokes made by philosophers in philosophic works. The
speech of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium is surely our first
certain example of philosophic humour, and there are other humorous moments
in Plato’s dialogues. The only references to Plato are though to the dismissal
of portrayals of the gods laughing in the Republic. Clearly there
is scope for further investigation here.

There is an index of the jokes by first line, punch line and subject,
which could usefully include all the times when each joke is discussed,
as some are used in illustration more than once.

© 2001 Janet D. Sisson

 

Janet D. Sisson, Department
of Philosophy, University of Calgary

Categories: Philosophical