WHAT PART OF 'KNOW' DON'T You UNDERSTAND?

Everything is funny as long as it is happening to someone else. -Will Rogers

I don't really like jokes; I only like the laughing. -George, aged 4

The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity.

-Arthur Schopenhauer, some time before, or after,

allegedly shoving a seamstress down the stairs'!

The above three sententiae profundae express the three classical theories of humour and laughter; the "superiority" theory often attributed to Hobbes, the "relief' or "discharge" theory-a descendent in some respects of the superiority theory-generally attributed to Freud(-ians), and the "incongruity" theory, which Kant is credited with having suggested and Schopenhauer refined. According to the first theory, humour is essentially a matter of laughing at the misfortunes of those less fortunate than oneself; according to the second, it is primarily a function of the emotional relief experienced by recognising that a joke isn't on oneself; and according to the third, humour is a funny hah-hah reaction to the funny peculiar. The divisions between these theories are not always neat. Not renowned for his reflections on the comic, Descartes in The Passions of the Soul wrote that laughter often involves derision or hatred directed at some imperfec­tion of another [Art. 126 & 178], joy in seeing that the evil we laugh at cannot harm us, or in averting it ourselves [Art. 127], and the surprise of something novel and unexpected [Art. 178]. These are the primary cognitive and sensory causes of laughter for Descartes but what laughter is was to be explained in hydraulic terms: a sudden heating and expansion of the blood from the heart through the arterial vein causing an immediate

"What Part of 'Know' Don't You Understand?" by Deborah Brown, The Monist, vol. 88, no. I, pp. 11-35. Copyright © 2005, THE MONlST, Peru, Illinois 61354.

12 DEBORAH BROWN

swelling of the lungs and muscles of the chest, throat and diaphragm, forcing air in an "explosive" fashion out of the windpipe while contract­ing the facial muscles into a grin [Art. 124]. The explanatory significance of the effects of a sudden and unexpected surprise on the diaphragm was also not lost on Descartes's predecessor, Juan Luis Vives, who "solved" thereby the ancient mystery of why some Roman soldiers, stabbed in the armpits, died laughing.2

Often accompanying these theories was a division, no longer obvious to many, between wit and humour. Wit [ingenium in the Latin tradition] was thought to be more intellectual, indeed, not really distinct from the intellect itself, not emotional and not, on some views, much of a laughing matter at alP The medievals often referred to the capacity for laughter, risibility, as a proprium, which, although not part of the definition of a human being, was a necessary quality following from that of rationality. The capacity for laughter was, and still is, regarded as the province of human beings, and thus intimately connected with our capacity for rational thought. This connection between laughter and rationality has persisted through the notion of wit. Humour, on the other hand, is a term with a much less sanctified history. In the Hippocratic and Galenic medical tra­ditions, the term originally denoted the four bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile) of our animal nature corresponding to the four elements (Earth, Air, Fire and Water), the proportions of which determined the mood, temperament and dispositions to certain kinds of passions of a person. These dispositions were not fixed but could be improved or altered through the medical and other arts. The humours were directly sensitive to stimulations of the external and internal senses, and thus a person's "humour" was highly susceptible to what they perceived going on around them.- During the Renaissance, the study of the humours and abnormal psychology generally was a source of fascination. Treatises on the passions and their relation to humouric physiology proliferated at the same time at which "Comedies of the 'humors'" were emerging.5 Someone could be either "in" or "out" of their humour and "to humour" someone was to affect the balance of their humours for better or worse. A political speech could, for example, easily put the audience out of its humour or, as we would say, in a bad mood, and thus being able to control an audience's humour through wit or ridicule could give one a political edge.6 Late sixteenth­and seventeenth-century literature saw the emergence of the "humourist,"

13 WHAT PART OF 'KNOW' DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

someone who, like William Shakespeare or Ben Jonson, constructed literary types from the characteristics associated with imbalances in the bodily humours: the Melancholic, (famously, Hamlet), the Sanguine, the Phlegmatic, and the Choleric. In this context, "humour" connoted eccen­tricity, which was anatomised on the stage to the chagrin of Elizabethan Puritans who would have preferred to hear the sixpence spent on seeing a Comedy of Humours tinkle instead in the collection plate.? By this asso­ciation with the physiological, "humour" compared to ''wit'' became a some­what degraded notion of a disposition to laugh deriving from a perception, bordering on pathos, of the ludicrous or incongruous in its particular in­stantiations. The pratfall may be humorous but it isn't witty. There could be a "sense" of humour but wit was concerned with drawing out abstract conceptual connections that are not directly the objects of perception.

Somewhere along the way, probably in the Victorian era, the distinc­tion between wit and humour became blurred.' It seems today that we no longer hear much of a distinction, and if we do not, it is not because we have sentimentalised wit but because we have intellectualised humour. Where the seventeenth century saw two distinct phenomena we now see a genus-humour---of which wit is a species, and we no longer attribute to the genus the relation to affect which was in an earlier age characteris­tic of humour. The affective aspect of humour has been de-emphasised, indeed, as we shall see in the case of some theorists, completely denied, and it is this tendency that this paper seeks to redress. Many theorists have noted that humour mimics reasoning by making abstract conceptual con­nections, and provides, thereby, occasions for expanding our knowledge or exercising our explanatory capacities. The denial of any connection between humour and the emotions is part of this relatively recent intel­lectualisation of the notion of humour, for the emotions are regarded as obstacles to reason not allies. I propose to argue that humour cannot play such roles with respect to reason and knowledge if understood as a purely intellectual, non-affective mode of experience.

Part of this ascension of an intellectualised conception of humour is due to the ascension of the incongruity theory above its rivals, the superi­ority and relief theories. Theories of humour founded on our baser moral or psychological motivations have faded off the map. No wonder. The su­periority theory is, frankly, daft. Perhaps any joke can serve as an occasion for self-aggrandisement-it is good for the ego to make people laugh­

14 DEBORAH BROWN

but it is hard to see the content of every joke or witticism as derisive towards others. Ethnic humour is typically held up as the paradigm of derisive humour, but it seems to me that much of it is self- as opposed to other-deprecating. Some of the best (and deliciously nasty) Irish jokes have been told to me by Irish folk, Jewish jokes by Jews and Newfie jokes by Newfoundlanders. As an Australian, it's difficult to think that one is doing oneself any favours by referring to Rolf Harris's Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport as Australia's favourite love song. (See also: "Are you awake?"-the Australian definition of foreplay-and its regional variation, "Are you awake, Sis?,,)9 And if I take the piss out of myself, I can hardly feel superior to the object of my derision unless, of course, I am not all there. Nor is it the case that, as Hobbes thought, wit is unique in betraying a sense of the "Oddness or Infirmity" in one's own character. lO

A self-deprecating Jewish joke is no more witty or moral than the standard Polish joke for being self- as opposed to other-deprecating. More often than not, though, humour simply has nothing to do with oneself or one's fragile ego and may not involve any derision at all.

This is not to say that humour cannot be used to devastating effect, and this is the major reason for its bad press from time to time. In 1711 Joseph Addison roiled against the ill use of "FALSE HUMOUR" in the following understated fashion:

The ImposlOr of whom I am speaking, descends originally from FALSEHOOD,

who was the Mother of NONSENSE, who was brought to bed of a Son called FRENZY, who Married one of the Daughters of FOLLY, commonly known by the Name of LAUGHTER, on whom he begot that Monstrous Infant of which I have been speaking. l1

But using humour to secure one's ill-gotten gains does not make humour necessarily derisive towards others. As Francis Hutcheson pointed out in 1725, if the superiority theory were correct, all laughter would have to involve a comparison between ourselves and others and the sudden ap­pearance of superiority must be sufficient to excite laughter if we attend to it. But neither is true, he argues, by way of examples like the following:

Many an orthodox Scotch presbyterian (which sect few accuse of disregard for the holy scriptures) has been put to it to preserve his gravity, upon hearing the application of scripture made by his countryman Dr. Pitcairn, as he observ'd a crowd in the streets about a mason, who had fallen along with his

15 WHAT PART OF 'KNOW' DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

scaffold, and was overwhelm'd with the ruins of the chimney which he had been building, and which fell immediately after the fall of the poor mason; "blessed are the dead which die in the lord, for they rest from their labours, and their works follow them."12

Hutcheson argues that the only candidate against which one might feel superior in this scenario is the poor mason (it can hardly be either the apostle or the doctor) but that opinion should have occurred prior to hearing the doctor and occasioned no laughter, When the bystanders do laugh it is not because they are comparing themselves favourably to anyone else present.13

We have perhaps not done justice to the superiority theory by these remarks but I'm not convinced it is worth more effort. John Morreall has suggested, however, that Hobbes was right to think that a sudden boost in a positive emotion can cause laughter and that this idea is essentially similar to that upon which the relief theory is based.!4 The relief theory is at least in this regard the natural heir of the superiority theory. But the laughter caused by a boost in positive emotions, as Morreall points out, has nothing essentially to do with feelings of superiority. The whimsical if somewhat bleak victims of Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb TInies­an alphabet book like no other, (E is for Ernest who choked on a peach, F is for Fanny sucked dry by a leech. , . )-are not occasions for self-ag­grandisement unless one thinks oneself superior for having avoided in childhood so peculiar a fate." But are they occasions for emotional relief? Although it is true that if a situation strikes one as threatening one is unlikely to find it funny, it does not follow that the absence of threat or the relief experienced at discovering this fact is a criterion for what makes a situation funny. It's implausible to think, moreover, that even the pretence ofa threat is at issne in most humourous situations, In any event, as a psy­chological theory, the relief theory has not withstood well its own experimental testing. Some psychologists have found more evidence for the hypothesis that the response to humour depends primarily upon arousal, which persists after the "resolution" of the joke and whatever relief may subsequently be experienced.!6 And typically the cause of such arousal is postulated to be the awareness of some incongruity or absurdity. What has thus come to be seen as typical of humour is what at one time was the preserve of wit; the recognition of some conceptual absurdity or incongruity,

The triumph of wit is thus the triumph, by default, of the incongruity theory and an intellectualised conception of humour. For Kant and Schopen­

16 DEBORAH BROWN

hauer, this incongruity is a matter of contradiction or conflict between ex­pectations. Humour, for Kant, is "an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing"; for Schopenhauer, it arises from the unexpected subsumption of an object under a concept. l7

The former seems too vague, the latter too specific. And yet the incon­gruity theory has proved more promising than its two main rivals and remains at the forefront of contemporary debates." It does not make humour dependent upon particular emotional responses like relief or feelings of superiority, and it captures the idea that the absurd is a common object of humour. In the example offered by Hutcheson against the superiority theory, an incongruity theorist can argue that the by­standers laugh because of the perceived incongruity between the sense of "and their works follow them" intended by the apostle and the sense in which the works of the poor mason followed him.

Kant's idea that humour transforms an expectation into "nothing" is vague but not less interesting for all that. It probably makes more sense in the context of Schopenhauer's theory even though he, Schopenhauer, seems not to have been persuaded by it. Kant writes that were the expec­tation to "transform itself into the positive opposite of an expected object . . . there would still be something, which might even be a cause of grief."!9 In terms of an incongruous relation between a concept and percept subsumed under it, were a positive, meaningful proposition to emerge, it would likely kill both the incongruity and the joke at the same time. So for those instances of humour which fit Schopenhauer's defini­tion, it seems correct to insist that the incongruity must remain at all times an incongruity, or else the joke dies. The sense in which the poor mason's works follow him cannot correspond exactly to that intended by the apostle or else there will be no joke and the occasion one for nothing but grief because it is unlikely that the mason will be remembered for that piece of work. What makes the joke possible is precisely the lack of fit between the scenario and the intended meaning of the apostle's words, together with the awkward or inappropriate way in which the scenario does indeed fit the literal meaning of the words. This point has some features in common with Donald Davidson's view about metaphor, according to which to suppose that metaphors create a special metaphori­cal meaning that somehow fits or corresponds to the facts is tantamount to "murdering the metaphor."20 Metaphors for Davidson, like jokes for Kant,

17 WHAT PART OF 'KNOW' DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

must terminate in nothing, no new propositional content, to achieve their effects of getting us to make comparisons between objects. One need not accept Davidson's conclusion that there is no such thing as metaphorical meaning to appreciate that metaphors require, in order to do their job, a recognisable lack of words-to-world fit.

Other examples of "strained expectations transforming into nothing" are sophistically valid argnments, like the one I tried (but failed) to impress upon George Lakoff as a counterexample to his claims about transitivity between literal and metaphorical uses of locative terms.

PI. I am in my car. n. My car is in need of repair.

C. Therefore, I am in need of repair.

If we allow the argument to go as far as the conclusion, supposing that the conclusion represents some positive state of affairs (good grief!), we have probably gone too far and missed the joke. In fact, it is more effective in telling this joke to stop with the second premise and let the audience draw the empty "conclusion" for themselves. Insofar as many jokes terminate in a non-sensical conclusion or punchline, and are funny for doing so, we should not expect jokes to terminate in meaningful propositions. This does not preclude us from recognising that jokes may, however, be occasions for constructing new arguments or propositional attitudes.

We have now to ask whether the recognition of incongruity is a necessary component of every humourous situation, and what the nature of the incongruity is which allegedly makes us laugh. Let us suppose for the moment that an awareness of an incongruity is a necessary condition for humour and laughter. The first thing we should note is that it is unlikely that humour always depends on Schopenhauer's discrepancy between concept and object. There is a saying in our family-"As soon as one door shuts, another closes," which is funny but not because of the un­expected subsumption of doors under the concept of being closed. Doors are often closed. The humour depends rather upon the contrast between this saying and its more optimistic and cliched cousin: "As soon as one door shuts, another opens." One might be tempted to say that whilst there is no literal incongruity in the first saying, there is incongruity when the

18 DEBORAH BROWN

sentence is taken metaphorically. But, even supposing that there is such a thing as metaphorical meaning, it doesn't seem correct to say that there is metaphorical incongruity either. In our family at least, the lack of oppor­tunity or success in one direction has frequently been followed by a lack of opportunity or success in another. (But we remain cheerful.) If there is incongruity, it is not of the form envisaged by Kant or Schopenhauer. Some things are funny, furthermore, hecause the facts, real or imagined, fail to meet our expectations in degree not kind. Consider, for example, the case of Epicurus, who expended so much energy making pleasure the end of all action only to think that it consisted in a little pot of cheese.2l

Here it is not absurd to think that a little pot of cheese is pleasurable­remember Brillat-Savarin's comment that "a meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye"22.-but that it should serve as a suf­ficient ohject of desire for the founder of an ancient School devoted to pleasure being the highest good is, well, funny. (What were we expecting through? Fast chariots, loose boys?) In such cases, a simple deflation of our expectations seems more important to explaining why we laugh than any incongruity between object and concept.

One conclusion to draw from these counterexamples to the incon­gruity theory is that what is more basic to humour than incongruity is just that our expectations are in some (okay, non-threatening) way overturned. But even this is an unreliable guide to what makes something funny. The running gag often retains its capacity to amuse despite its being both repeated and expected. And as D. H. Monro pointed out in his seminal study of humour, Argument ofLaughter, some things are funny precisely because they arc So predictable.23 The colleague who constructs ingenious excuses to shirk work every time, the Aunt who has her socks off display­ing her bunions within 30 seconds of arriving at any family party are examples that can provoke laughter simply because they occur often and predictably so. Such behaviour is not even incongruous-it is often all too easily explained-and that, in itself, particularity when it issues from a defect or eccentricity in a person's character, can be an occasion for laughter.24

Here it seems that it is the very congruity of a person's behaviour with their character, their rigidity, which is a source of amusement.

Counterexamples like the above do not tend, however, to worry con­temporary incongruity theorists much. The notion of incongruity has been expanded to include a wide range of phenomena: inappropriateness (Munro),

19 WHAT PART OF 'KNOW' DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

disharmony, discrepancy, disagreement in character or qualities, discord, inconsistency, unsuitableness, incoherence, unreasonableness, unconven­tionality and absurdity (Martin)." "As soon as one door shuts, another closes," might be said to be incongruous with a convention against making trivial or irrelevant statements, or offering pessimistic statements as a form of consolation, the recognisably deliberate violation of which enables the audience to appreciate the humour behind the speaker's pessimism. Epicurus' pot of cheese will be argued to be incongruous against some concept, for example, the highest good, or just simply inap­propriate to a philosophical system based on the pursuit of pleasure. And the fact that a little pot of cheese is incongruous with respect to some concepts is compatible with its being congruous with respect to others, for example, pleasure, that are active in the audience's mind at the same time. Indeed, for some theorists, humour entails that the audience judges si­multaneously that the situation is both "highly implausible and a little bit plausible."26 And a little pot of cheese is a plausible object of desire for someone who spends more time talking about pleasure than pursuing it.

lt should also be noted that although contemporary incongruity theorists argue that the awareness of an incongruity is a necessary condition for humour, no one is suggesting that it is a sufficient condition. Many kinds of incongruities are not humourous. Plastic fruit is incongruous but not funny. As Mike Martin also notes, even though they sometimes come close to being funny and are incongruities we enjoy, the incongruities found in surrealist paintings are not typically objects of laughter.2? So the incongruity theorist must be content with incongruity as a necessary condition and with the understanding that an incongruity is basically anything we find odd. But now it appears that the theory has weakened itself beyond having anything very useful or specific to say about humour at all. The compelling conclusion is that "humour" is a family resem­blance concept, a concept that denotes a motley collection of experiences bearing no single essence or defining criteria. And this should be (and is!) a disturbing prospect for contemporary incongruity theorists.2'

More than any other theory, however, the incongruity theory brings to the fore the ways in which our taking delight in the extraordinary depends On our ordinary rational capacities. The capacities by virtue of which we detect structure and make sense of the world at the same time attune us to breaks in normal patterns. I do not in what remains of this essay

20 DEBORAH BROWN

want to offer a new theory of humour for I suspect that nothing is more ridiculous than attempting to define the ridiculous2• As E. B. White ap­parently once remarked: "Analysing humour is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." My task here is to argue for something other than a theory of humour. It is simply the claim that the traditional connection between humour and affect is one tradition worth preserving.30 Direct attempts to define the essence of humour have floun­dered, and what I shall have to say concerns not the essence of humour directly but one of its functions. The function I have in mind has, however, been brought out most forcefully by the incongruity theory. If humour is at least connected with our ability to detect incongruities, it has an obvious relation to reason, for the ability to make sense of the world pre­supposes the capacity to detect non-sense and that which lies beyond comprehension. The medievals were right to regard the capacity for laughter as simply part and parcel of what it is to be a rational human being, and to that extent, it belongs as much to the practice of philosophy as any other method for distinguishing sense and non-sense. This capacity for appreciating (or generating) humour, or the humourous attitnde, is, I shall argue, connected with those processes that perfonn the crucial function of directing reason, which is not to say that reason cannot be directed or direct itself in other ways. And my claim is that, insofar as the humourous attitnde performs this function, it does so by virtne of being an affective attitnde.

It is important to notice that thinking of the capacity for humour as an affective attitnde flies in the face of much recent theorising about humour. John Morreall, for example, has argued that humour and laughter can assist reason and our epistemic endeavours only by being ''unencumbered'' with emotion.

Now in this development of reason, emotions would have been not a boon but an encumbrance, for in an emotional state a person looks at a situation practically and as related to himself or herself. Amusement by contrast, like artistic activities and science, would be helpful in the development of reason because it involves a breaking out of a practical and self-concerned frame of mind and an attention to things not only as related to us but as related to other things of their kind and to other things generally.... The capacity of humor to block emotions would also have facilitated the development of rationali­ty, for emotions, which served pre-human animals so well, would often get

21 WHAT PART OF 'KNOW' DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

in the way of rational thinking, as indeed they still do. To be able to face in­congruity in one's experience---especially one's own failure-with amusement instead of anger or sadness, allows a person a more objective and rational per­spective on what is happening.31

Morreal!'s reasoning, out of tune as it is with recent work in the cognitive sciences on the integration of our rational and emotional faculties,'2 is based on the assumption that adopting a humourous attitude, much like adopting a philosophical attitude, depends on "distancing" oneself from the practical aspects of one's situation, a process which both neutralises one's emotions and makes for greater objectivity. Ronald de Sousa iden­tifies the same attitude behind the views of Horace Walpole who once remarked that "this world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel," and of Henri Bergson." Despite his general arguments concerning the "strategic insufficiency of reason without emotion,"34 de Sousa finds Morreall's point "unexceptionable in connection with wit" but proceeds to identify a species of mirth (an emotion which produces laughter) that betrays the emotional attitudes of the subject and thus for which the subject may be held morally responsible.'5 It is not the details of this argument which concern us here but rather this generally shared as­sumption that humour approaches its perfection in wit the more it issues from reason unencumbered by emotions, and that, because of this, wit, like art and science, can assist in the development of reason.

There is, however, something odd about this glorification of humour ''unencumbered by emotion" and that is the assumption that humour will make us free, that it serves only reason not unreason. And whilst I think there is something to this idea, I don't think that it is obvious. The idea is not, moreover, all that new. One of the earliest systematic defenders of wit and humour, Anthony Ashley COOper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, held a similar view about a certain kind of humour, which he classified as ridicule or ''just raillery." In An Essay on the Freedom a/Wit and Humour, Shaftesbury attempts to defend (what later would be referred to as) "ridicule as a criterion of truth."

Truth, 'tis supposed, may bear all lights; and one of the principal lights, or natural mediums, by which things are to be viewed, in order to a thorough recognition, is ridicule itself, or that manner of proof by which we discern whatever is liable to just raillery in any subject.'6

22 DEBORAH BROWN

Shaftesbury's defense of ridicule-humour directed towards destabilising the prejudiced views of others-involves his arguing that truth will always withstand the brunt of ridicule whereas falsity can best be exposed by the freedom of thought expressed through ridicule. Shaftesbury's idea that the truth is immune to ridicule finds support in the old adage "it would be funny if it wasn't true," whereas "That's ridiculous'" implies it couldn't possibly be true, (although too often when we say this, it is). Shaftesbury backs his witty friends for their ingenuity, fair-minded, questioning attitude and comic acuity in matters of religion, policy and morals over both his puritanical opponents and the "modem Philosophers" who can never agree on either one system of thought or set of moral principles and who are in the grip of a delusional "partial scepticism."37 Ridicule or raillery produces "a gentle confusion" in the audience that is of greater as­sistance in the pursuit of truth than abstract arguments.

But how is it exactly that truth is supposed to be immune from ridicule and falsity not? Suppose that scepticism were a viable standpoint, whilst it may be possible to doubt what seem to be blatantly true state­ments such as "I have two hands," it is harder to ridicule them. But, in general, the truth of a belief or statement is not itself a sufficient protec­tion against ridicule. Nor can it be that when we are "in our humour" we suspend judgement, for that would make every proposition, true or false, epistemically immune to ridicule. The claim that false beliefs are somehow more susceptible to ridicule than true ones seems to be an empirical claim and a spurious one at that. We can, one would think, be just as easily gulled out of at least some of our true beliefs through ridicule as out of our false ones."

Elsewhere, Shaftesbury's target of ridicule seems less the false beliefs that we sometimes hold than our faculty for self-deceit, based as it is on "a very small foundation of any passion."'. If aimed at self-deception, ridicule addresses not so much a particular proposition a person holds true than the wider context in which the belief is formed and compared to other beliefs. In this way, as M. J. Scott-Taggart has argued, Shaftesbury's notion of ridicule plays a role similar to that of reductio arguments, which function primarily to show that some proposition a reasoner holds true is inconsistent with or absurd against others the reasoner is logically or ra­tionally forced to accept as true.40 But ridicule, according to Scott-Taggart, does this in a special way by juxtaposing a person's belief against patently

23 WHAT PART OF 'KNOW' DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

absurd propositions. If this is Shaftesbury's idea, then false beliefs are more likely targets for ridicule for being more likely the products of fal­lacious reasoning or irrationality. But true beliefs arising from defective modes of reasoning are also made thereby targets of ridicule. On this reading, ridicule or humour can serve the development of reason by targeting inconsistency and self-deception. It may even go further than reductio arguments "by pointing to possible causes or premisses [as much] as to the effects or consequences" of inconsistency and self-deception4 \

Ridicule thus serves as a criterion of truth indirectly for it uncovers in­consistencies or failures of reason that are incompatible with the rational pursuit of the truth.

One of the finest examples of ridicule used to expose a kind of self­deceit can be found towards the end of Book II of Sextus Empiricus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism. In the course of discussing (useless) dialectical responses to sophistic reasoning, Sextus recounts the story of Diodorus Cronus, who held that motion did not exist. Diodorus reasoned by the following sophistical method: Everything either moves where it is or where it is not; but nothing moves where it is (for there it is at rest) or where it is not (for nothing can move where it doesn't exist); therefore nothing moves. Now that is asking for trouble and, sure enough, suffering a dislocated shoulder, Diodorus found himself at the door of the physician, Herophilus, who offered him only the consolation of philoso­phy. "Your shoulder has been put out either in the place where it was or where it was not; but it was put out neither where it was nor where it was not; therefore it has not been put OUt."42 That will be 20 drachmae, please! On Sextus' retelling, Diodorus is said to have beseeched the doctor to leave such arguments aside and apply his medical arts, and this story, to Sextus' mind, demonstrates more effectively than dialectical reasoning the fallacious quality of Diodorus' argument against motion. To show that what one believe is inconsistent or "incongruous" with the very conduct of life is to show the height of one's irrationality.

Ridicule often has this feature of demonstrating a gap between belief and action. Demonstrating such gaps brings our false beliefs to our attention in a particularly vivid and personal way by showing us that it is we who embody the incongruity or absurdity in question rather than pre­senting it as an abstract object of contemplation. If one's colleague continually invents elaborate excuses to shirk work, it is annoying and

24 DEBORAH BROWN

provokes anger, but if others imitate the behaviour in a comic fashion with the consequence that everyone has an equally ingenious excuse to avoid the work, one's colleague may begin to see the way in which he or she is ridiculous. If Shaftesbury is right, ridicule need not be threatening. If a situation is comic, negative emotions like anger can be defused. Insofar as ridicule has this role to play, exposing inconsistency and self-deceit, there is no reason to suppose, as Shaftesbury does, that it is in any intrinsic way opposed to the aims and practice of philosophy. And I think we may grant Shaftesbury the point that "truth," on the understanding that this stands for something more general than true propositions and includes the very processes by which we rationally form beliefs and avoid self-deception, cannot be shaken by wit and ridicule in the way that "falsehood" or irra­tionality can. When the reasoning is sound, it stands to reason that certain kinds of ridicule aimed at defects of reasoning will not be possible. Had Diodorus held, for example, that motion and rest were relative notions it would have been harder to ridicule his beliefs about motion on the grounds that relative to one co-ordinate system, his shoulder had not moved and so was not dislocated, for his shoulder's being at rest according to one co­ordinate system is compatible with its having moved relative to another.

Can ridicule bave this effect ofexposing us, through "agentle confusion," to our own self-deceits, on the supposition that we are emotionally disen­gaged? Many have thought that the cool eye of objectivity needed to see one's own irrationality demands precisely such disengagement. If one is offended or embarrassed by the ridicule, one is more likely to be defensive or otherwise prevented from attending to one's reasoning in the right way. But what I propose to argue now is that there is a deeper sense in which ridicule in particular and humour generally, insofar as these may ·be of service to right reason, require at least one kind ofemotional engagement with the situation.

The problem for "distancing" theories like Morreal],s is that, although reason can do many things, it cannot surprise itself, and whatever theory of humour one subscribes to, surprise is at least an important component of much humour. (I will say something in a moment about those cases in which we laugh or are amused despite the object being expected or pre­dictable or already known.) If the classical incongruity theory is correct, humour functions to bring to our attention novel and incongruous con­ceptual connections that are surprising and delighting. But reason cannot

25 WHAT PART OF 'KNOW' DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

UJlparadoxically bring to its own attention novel conceptual connections unless it is already in some sense aware of them, and, in that case, such connections ought to be neither novel nor surprising. And it does not seem fair to deny this by saying that we cannot amuse ourselves but only others (anymore than, as Aristotle noted, we cannot tickle ourselves), because the element of surprise is absent, since, in formulating a joke, we can and often do amuse ourselves as much as others. Provided that the way in which a joke "comes to us" is not a matter of intending to tell ourselves a certain joke we already know but more like something which falls out of a free association of ideas, we may be as surprised as if someone else had told us the joke. This certainly seems to me closer to the phenomenology of "making up" jokes, which suggests that it is radically different from telling jokes to others. But I shall not pursue this idea here. My argument is rather that the element that explains our surprise at whatever new con­ceptual connections we encounter through humour has to be something that motivates reason in a certain direction but is not the same thing as reason.43

To attribute the function of motivating reason to emotions one has to hold a certain view about emotions-viz, that they are representational states of mind and thus have objects which they present to reason for its consideration and amusement. I am not going to argue for this view of emotions here but I am going to assume, as most prominent theories of the emotions today do, that with the exception of so-called "objectless" emotions or moods such as depression or general elation or sadness not aroused by the awareness of any particular event, emotions have intentional content. I am angry that an institution has not returned my call, afraid of snakes, delighted about an old friend's coming to see me. To hold the view that an emotion represents that to which it is a reaction, does not require holding, as some do, that emotions are, or presuppose, judgements and are therefore products of reason.44 It is enough that emotions represent things as being a certain way, whether or not one believes or judges it to be so, and in this way they can present scenarios to reason prior to and for its judgement. This last point is important if emotions are to playa role in the analysis of humour, for more often than not humour requires being able to "see" things as being a certain way one knows they couldn't possibly be.

What kind of motivational factor could play the role of capturing the attention of reason in the way humour does? The emotion Descartes iden­tified as the "first of all passions," wonder [i'admiration], is an emotion

26 DEBORAH BROWN

tailored to this function of directing reason. It may seem to some too quaint to retrieve a seventeenth-century concept for the purposes of defining the affective aspect of humour (and cognitive psychologists will no doubt be happier taking about the arousal systems that explain attention and working memory). Call it what you will; my interest is in the kind of function wonder is supposed to perform as a directive to reason, a reaction to the surprising and extraordinary, and a primary source of mo­tivation to acquire knowledge.

Descartes distinguishes between two kinds of wonder according to whether the object is something novel and surprising or familiar but ex­traordinary. The first and logically prior notion, defined at Article 53 of The Passions ofthe Soul, concerns objects that are new to our experience:

When the first encounter with some ohject surprises us, and we judge it to be novel, or very different from that which we knew before, or from what we supposed that it ought to be, this makes us wonder at and be astonished by it. And since this may bappen before we know whether the object is benefi­cial to us or not, it seems to me that wonder is the first of all the passions. And it has no contrary, because, if the object that presents itself has nothing that surprises us, we are not moved by it at all, and we consider it without passion. [AT XI, 373]45

Since we have to notice something before we develop a positive or negative attitude towards it, wonder is, for Descartes, the first of all passions. Given the effects of a sudden surprise on the blood and diaphragm, wonder is also the primary cause of laughter. There are several interesting ideas in the passage just quoted: wonder is primarily directed at what is novel or unexpected or incongruous (insofar as it is not as "we supposed it ought to be"); wonder is evaluatively neutral in that it entails no judgement about the good or evil or indeed even about the nature of the object; and, finally, wonder has no opposite for we are not moved by the overly familiar or uninteresting.46

This kind of emotion is clearly compatible with the experience of humour. From the first point we can see that wonder has the right sort of objects to be a constituent of humour: the unexpected, the incongruous, the surprising, the novel. Beyond these general categories, there is no re­striction on the kinds of objects that may cause us to wonder. We may wonder at objects that stimulate the senses, at descriptions of non-actual situations, or at abstractions, which are the currency of the intellect. On

27 WHAT PART OF 'KNOW' DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

the second point, since wonder is evaluatively neutral it explains the absence of overpowering negative or positive emotions, which many theorists have noted can prevent an amused reaction. Wonder is compati­ble however with pleasure because we natural1y take delight in things we find interesting or novel. The final point, that wonder lacks an opposite, explains why what we know to be true does not generally surprise us, compared to that of which we are ignorant or which we do not expect. It also explains why wonder, and by extension humour, can lead us to knowledge by making us ponder or consider something we hadn't noticed before. Finally, it would show one important feature of this kind of emotion: since it is a reaction to novelty, wonder is an emotion that is dis­sipated by knowledge. This has an important application with regard to amusement, for knowledge can extinguish or prevent a reaction of amusement. With some exceptions (the running gag, etc.), we may smile at, laugh and enjoy jokes we have heard before but it is hard for them to have exactly the same effect that they had when we first heard them. On the other hand, knowledge that the scenario represented in a joke is "other than it is supposed to be" would not of itself extinguish the wonder because the object of wonder need not be itself an object of knowledge but can be a counterfactual state of affairs.

This is not to say that what we know to be true cannot cause us to wonder at it or laugh. Descartes's second variety of wonder, contained in the definition at Article 70, is directed at things that are primarily rare and extraordinary, and which mayor may not be new to our experience.

Wonder is a sudden surprise of the soul, which brings it to consider with attention the objects that seem to it rare and extraordinary. [AT XI, 380]

These two senses of wonder are rellected in the following two uses to which the word 'wonder' is put in English (and 'admirer' in pre-modem French):

(a) I wonder whether such-and-such is the case,

(b) It is a wonder that such-and-such is the case.

Only (a) implies ignorance of the thing in question and that it was unex­pected. In accord with the second sense, (b), we might wonder at the greatness of some thing that is already known to us (Descartes had in

28 DEBORAH BROWN

mind the freedom of the human will, ho-hum), and this kind of wonder is not extinguished by knowledge. For Descartes, this second kind of wonder lacks the element of surprise and so does not cause us to laugh. But we need not accept that since something known is wondered at because it is rare or extraordinary, it is unsurprising and incapable of causing us to laugh. If we were to accept this conclusion it would follow that we could not be amused by things that are highly predictable, like a colleague's behaviour in meetings or an aged Aunt's behaviour at a party. Yet someone's behaving in a predictable fashion may mimic the effects of an unanticipated surprise in the way that we can be surprised even when a sure bet comes off. Part of what is funny in cases of highly predictable eccentric behaviour is not the mere predictability of it but the fact that that behaviour, a behaviour that is eccentric, unorthodox, incongruous or blatantly selfish, etc., should be so predictable. The running gag is open to a similar kind of analysis-what is funny is that the telling of a joke, something usually constituting a one-off event, should form a repeatable pattern. The running gag is funny for playing with the very form of joke­telling, for being a meta-joke, and that, if done artfully, can surprise and delight us. Something's being unexpected is thus, I claim, a sufficient but not necessary condition for its being surprising.

Both varieties of wonder are important, according to Descartes, for explaining the very possibility of scientific knowledge because the function of wonder is not merely to bring what is novel and interesting before our attention but to keep it there long enough to be scientifically in­vestigated. For Descartes, it is the passion of wonder that, in the first instance, explains how the mind is drawn to an object and why the object is kept in working memory.

One is able to say [of wonder] in part that it is useful in that it makes us leam and retain in our memory things we have hitherto ignored for we wonder only at that which appears to US rare and extraordinary and something is able to appear thus to us only because we have been ignorant of it or it is different from the things we have known. For it is this difference that makes it that which one calls 'extraordinary'. When a thing which we did not know presents itself as new to our understanding or our senses, we do not retain it in our memory. unless the idea that we have of it is fortified in our brain by some passion; or as well by an application of our understanding that our will determines to a particular attention and reflection. [AT XI, 384]47

29 WHAT PART OF 'KNOW' DONTYOU UNDERSTAND?

Why attribute such functions of guiding reason to an emotion? Descartes's answer here suggests that the attention to, and retention of, the novel or extraordinary does not originate from reason (although reason and will may perform this function if an object is already known) so something must move reason to attend to a thing and this he calls wonder.4' To the degree that our capacity for humour or wit cau perform a similar function of getting the mind to attend to the surprising and absurd juxtapositions of ideas, it presupposes, I submit, an affective engagement with the object of attention.

One consequence of making wonder a central component of the ex­perience of humour is that if something is too easily explained, it ceases to be a source of wonder. This is useful for explaining why jokes that raise philosophical puzzles, like Herophilus', withstand the test of time. Philo­sophical puzzles are rarely easily explained. It may also offer a means for distinguishing good from bad humour. Puns are often derided (unfairly) by humour theorists as one of the lowest forms of wit (next to sarcasm?) and the reason generally offered is that once the double meaning is dis­covered there's usually not much more to discover49 Linguistic sophistication is obviously not as impressive to some as conceptual so­phistication. But it is often hard to separate the two. A good pun--e.g.• A blind limbo dancer walks into a bar. ... -often offers more than a double meaning, in this case. a spoof on the "X walks into a bar" genre of jokes.5o

To my mind. there are less interesting forms of humour than the pun. Slapstick, clowning and practical jokes, have to engage the mind as well as the senses in order to remain memorable. Even though it involves in­congruous or inappropriate behaviour. clowning often requires little thought on the part of the audience to understand why the behaviour is in­congruous or inappropriate. (So there was confetti in the bucket instead of water. ho-hum.) But even here there are exceptions. The antics of clowns always failed to amuse me (even as a small child) until I saw Circus Oz. in which a clown performed the usual clown tricks suspended by his feet from the ceiling. A pratfall is still not witty, but it is more interesting performed upside down on the ceiling in clothes and with props that defy the law of gravity. The act made the audience think about how hard it would be to appear to be performing normal tasks while hanging upside down (e.g., flopping down on a chair, throwing a hat onto a peg) and then to clown around on top of that. Some humour sustains wonder simply by

30 DEBORAH BROWN

resisting explanation in much the same way that good magic tricks are good precisely because their explanation remains a mystery. If I am right, the best kind of humour is so because it stimulates the same kinds of processes we use to make sense of the world, leaving open the possibility of further thought in order to explain what has been seen or heard, even if the end result is, as Kant hinted, the converse of an adequate explana­tion-viz, a fine appreciation of non-sense.

I have offered the notion of wonder as a supplement to an account of the functions of humour, not as part of a definition of humour. We wonder at many things we find surprising, like surrealist artworks, without neces­sarily being amused by them. What accounts for these differences I cannot say. (I suspect timing has a lot to do with it-surrealist art does not typically structure our thought and expectations in one direction only to derail it in another, but is already and immediately derailed-but I shall leave such discriminations to others.) I have argued that Descartes's two notions of wonder are particularly suited to form part of the explanation of our experience of humour. This experience often involves a sudden reaction to something surprising, unexpected or not "as it is supposed to be," or to something expected or predictable but surprising in part because of that. It is an experience which does not entail strong (potentially coun­teracting) negative or positive emotions, and which motivates us to remain in a state of pleasant attention to its object. In its primary sense, wonder presupposes a gap between the scenario presented and what we take for granted and can thus explain why forms of humour like ridicule are so effective against hypocrisy, irrationality, and inconsistency. These are obvious sites for such gaps to arise. Finally, as an aid to reason, wonder stimulates the same kind of explanatory processes used generally to close gaps between what we know and the way things appear, and tbus stands on a continuum with the philosophical imagination.

And finally: The ability to laugh at oneself, on this view, is the ability to wonder at one's own self-caused deficiencies, deficiencies which, insofar as they are self-caused, must be traced back to something one has control over, namely, the exercise of one's rational and volitional faculties.51 The ability to laugh at oneself should thus at the same time be seen as the ability to motivate oneself to overcome one's deficiencies of reason. The best kind of humour is the kind that activates and sustains the intellect in considering some topic from a completely fresh perspective.

31 WHAT PART OF 'KNOW' DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

And in this regard the capacity for humour is like the philosophical attitude, best employed in contexts where we are ignorant of the natures of things. Humour that trades on our ignorance or self-deceit, brings it to light, and makes us laugh at it, is a wondrous thing.52

Deborah Brown University ofQueensland Australia

NOTES

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane & J. Kemp (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964): I, 76.

2. Juan Luis Vives, De anima et vita,ill. 202. (Basilea 1538fforino: Bottega d'Erasmo, 1963).

3. Hobbes allowed that laughter without offence was possible when it proceeds from "absurdities and infinnities abstraeted from persons." Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature, in English Works ofThomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth (IB39, reprinted 1962), IV, 45-46,56.

4. The "internal" senses included imagination, memory, the communis sensus (a faculty for combining different images of the same object into a more complete image,) and on some theories such as Avicenna's and Aquinas's, an estimative faculty for perceiv­ing the non-sensible evaluative properties of things, such as the malice of the wolf for the sheep or the usefulness of sticks for the bird.

5. For a survey of treatises on the passions of humours in the Middle Ages and Re~

naissance, see Ruth Harvey, The lnward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. (London: Warburg Institute Surveys no. 6. 1975), and my 'What Was New in the Passions of 16491" in Norms and Modes ofThinking in Descartes, Millo Yr­jonsuuri and Thomo Aho, oos., Acta Philosophica Fennica, 64, (1999); 211-31. For an account of the proliferation of comedies of humours in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see Percy Simpson's introduction to Ben Jonson's Ellery Man In His Humour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946).

6. The resentment that such uses of humour provoked would not go away easily. As we shall see below, the third Earl of Shaftesbury was foreed publicly to defend the use of ridicule in public forums at the beginning of the eighteenth century. See Shaftesbury's An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, in Characteristics ofMen, Matters, Opinions, Times, ed. J. M. Robertson (Lihrary of Liberal Arts, 190011964).

7. For a diseussion of pUritanical responses to comedies of the humours in Elizabethan England see again Perey Simpson's introduetion to Ben Jonson's Every Man In His Humour, at l.ix. See also Jonson's Every Man Out ofHis Humour, (Oxford: Oxford Uni­versity Press, The Malone Society Reprints, 16(011920).

B. In The Triwnph of Wi', (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), Rohert Bernard Martin has traced the convergence of the notions of wit, with its intellectual connotations, and humour with its emotional and sentimental connotations, to the Victorian period.

32 DEBORAH BROWN

9. It has been suggested to me that these jokes, when told by Australian men, are displays of hyper-masculinity and unconventional sexual prowess (in which case all] can say is, "God help them!") and, I suppose, if wid by Australian women, such jokes could be said to be expressions of superiority over their countrymen (which raises the question why we put up with them). But I still can't see such jokes (told by either sex) as occasions for pride. In any case, there seems no good reason to role out a priori the possibility of self-deprecating humour.

10. Thomas Hobbes, Human Na/ure, (1650), IX, 13. 11. The Spec/a/or, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965): I, 47,

quoted in the Introduction to Francis Hutcheson's Thoughts on Laughter (Bristol: Thoemmes, 175811989) by lobn Valdimir Price.

12. Hutcheson, Thoughts on Laughter, p. 8. 13. Ibid., pp. 8-9. 14. John Morreall, Taking Laughter Seriously, (Albany, NY: State University of New

York Press, 1983) at p. 47. 15. Edward Gorey, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1963). 16. See M. K. Rothbart, "Psycbological Approaches to the Study of Humour," in A. J.

Chapman and H C. Foot, cds., It's a Funny Thing, Humour, (New York: Pergamon, 1977) and Jerry Palmer, Taking Humour Seriously, (London: Routledge, 1994): ch. 7.

17. Immanuel Kant, Krink der Urteilskraft, trans. J. H. Bernard (London: Macmillan, 1892): p. 223; Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and 1. Kemp (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), vol. I, ch. 13.

18. For a sophisticated revision of the incongruity theory to include the inappropriate as objects of humour see D. H. Monro, Argument of Laughter. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), ch. 19.

19. Immanuel Kant, Krink der UrteilskraJt, p. 224. 20. Donald Davidson, "What Metaphors Mean," in his Essays on Trwh and interpreta­

tion (Oxford; Clarendon, 1984). 21. From Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Philosophers, 10.11. 22. A. BriJlat·Savarin, The Philosopher in the Kitchen. Penguin Handbook, 1985. 23. Monro also includcs practical jokes in this category of humour not involving

surprise or violated expectations because the audience, though not the victim, expects what is gong to happen but laughs anyway. [Argument ofwughter, p. 147.] However, the latter are not pure cases because it is arguable that what we enjoy in these cases is seeing the victim's expectations violated or his being surprised, with which we can empathetically identify.

24. Here it may be said that the incongruity rests with the "inappropriateness" of the behaviour or its incongruity with acceptable modes of behaviour. [See Monro, Argument ofLaughter, ch. 19.] But it is not incongruous in the sense of being incompatible with truth or transforming into nothing or involving any clash of concepts with percepts. Eccentric­ity can be amusing but it need not produce the kinds of cognitive discrepancies or contradictions usually cited by incongruity theories.

25. Monro was the first to suggest an expansion of the sense of "incongruity" away from the confines of Schopenhauer's view favouring the notion of inappropriateness as a genus. Ibid., ch. 19. Mike Martin takes inspiration from the OED entries under 'incongruity' in preparing his list. Mike W. Martin, "Humour and Aesthetic Enjoyment of incon­gruities," British Journal ofAesthetics, vol. 23, no. l. (1983): 74-84, at p. 76.

33 WHAT PART OF 'KNOW' DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

w26. This is part of Jerry Palmer's "logic of the absurd," a sudden creation of discrepancy or incongruity and a bifurcated logical process leading the listener to judge the state of affairs both highly implausible and a little bit plausible. Taking Humour Seriously, p. 96.

27. Martin, "Humour and Aesthetic Enjoyment of Incongruities," p. 79. Martin presents these cases as counterexamples to Michael Clark's attempt in "Humour and Incongruity," Philosophy, vol. 45, 171 (1970): 20-32, to refine the ineongruity theory hy arguing that enjoyment of an apparent incongruity for its own sake is equally a necessary condition for laughter. [sec. VI] Martin suggests postulating a necessary connection between amusement and laughter. Whether there is a conceptual connection between amusement and laughter is, however, a good question. Certainly, each can exist without the other, but that, as Clark acknowledges, would not vitiate the need for a criteriological connection between them. Clark prefers to supplement his original theory by positing distinct conceptual relations between amusement and emotions on the one hand, and aesthetic experience and the emotions on the other. His idea is that amusement qualifies emotions like grief, awe, pity and shame whereas aesthetic enjoyment is compatible with these. Strong negative emotions like fear, terror, distress, may exclude, however, both. See pp. 240-43 of his "Humour, Laughter and the Structure of Thought," British Journal ofAesthetics, vol. 27, 3 (1987): 238-46. 1 can think of eounterexamples to this idea, for example, gallows or death-bed humour.

28. Michael Clark. an ineongruity theorist himself, raises the prospect that humour is a family-resemblance concept in "Humour and Incongruity," p. 20.

29. This, anyway, has been the pattern: as soon as one set of criteria emerge someone comes up with a joke that doesn't fit the criteria.

30. This is not to say that modem theories of humour do not recognise the importance of emotions in the development of humour. Morreall distinguishes between "non­humourous laughter" whieh issue..'i from "emotional shifts" as a developmental stage in the progression towards "humourous laughter" which arises from "cognitive shifts." It is such shifts that he takes to be necessary and sufficient for humour, and although humour may produce various kinds of feelings (pleasure, emotional release or relief, etc.) its essenee lies in the enjoyment of incongruity. Morreall, Taking Laughter Seriously, pp. 45-47. Monro argues that humour involves a ''violent coJ1ision" or "mixing" of emotional attitudes when something "inappropriate" (rather than incongruous) is introduced into a context or brought into connection with something it does not nOImally connect with. Monro, Argument of Laughter, p. 157. But Monro has in mind the emotional attitudes which are part of our expectations, or what we take to be the conventional view about a certain subject matter and which are destroyed Or bought into conflict by the punch-line. Agood example Monro cites is Oscar Wilde's comment that 'The youth of to-day are quite monstrous. They have absolutely no respect for dyed hair." [po 241] On Monro's diagnosis, the first remark establishes a conventional sentiment and a familiar train of ideas, which gets derailed by or collides with the ending-''vecy unsettling to the man of fixed ideas." [po 241] The emotional attitudes Monro has in mind involve, however, evaluative judge­ments that are provoked by part of the joke and brought into conflict with those suggested by the punch-line. My argument concerns a non-evaluative emotional attitude that is connected with humour and which explains our noticing and being surprised by the clashes between ideas these theorists take as central to all humour.

31. John Morreall, "Humour and Emotion," American Philosophical Quarterly (1983) 20: 297-305,atpp. 302-03.

34 DEBORAH BROWN

32. Compare, for example, the work of cognitive neuropsychologists such as Antonio Damasio and Joseph Le Doux, who argue that rational deeision-making depends on higher cortical emotional processes. Antonio Darnasio. Descartes' Error: &notion, Reason and the Human Brain, (New York: GrossettlPutnam, 1994) and Joseph Le Doux, The Emotional Brain, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

33. Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality ofEmotion, (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1987) at p. 288.

34. Ibid., ch. 7. This refers to the insufficiency of pure reason to explain how we attend to the relevant information from all that is cognitively available and draw the relevant in­ferences whilst, crucially, ignoring the infinitely many irrelevant ones. See the discussion of the "frame problem," pp. 192-97.

35. Ibid., pp. 289-92. A species of mirth includes cases of what de Sousa calls "phthonic humour" (from the Greek word for malicious envy), for example, rape jokes or racist humour that will not be found funny unless the sexist or raeist assumptions that underlie the joke, and which de Sousa claims are emotional attitudes, are shared. This point is incompatible with the assumption of distancing presupposed in views like Morreall's, Bergson's and Walpole's, and with de Sousa's own account of wit. Such jokes, by definition for de Sousa, could not be instances of wit. Oark takes humour's relations to emotions to be distinctive of it but not in any way that would explain why something was funny. Nor is it clear that Oark has a good case for the particular emotional connec­tions he thinks are ruled out by the experience of humour. Sec n. 26.

36. Shaftesbury, An &say on the Freedom of Wit aru1 HwnOUT, I, 44. 37. Ibid., I, 80-8I. 38. Few writers on wit and humour have been prepared to argue that wit and humour

are themselves forms of knowledge. One exception is Isaac Tuxton, whom Martin identi­fies as having defended the idea that wit, in a paradoxical manner, reveals the real congruity of two or more terms that seem at first sight incompatible. Wit, on this view, is and communicates genuine knowledge. We need not agree with Tuxton on this conflation of wit and knowledge to accept the importance of wit to knowledge. As an expression of knowledge, wit may carry the same kind of conversational implicatures about what propo­sitions a person believes or knows to be the true as figurative speech acts without stating or asserting these propositions. Tuxton 1S also unique for having subsumed humour under wit as "the wit of the emotions or feelings ... the fusion of contrasted emotions." Martin, The Triwnph of Wit, pp. 44-45.

39. Shaftesbury, An Essay on the Freedom o/Wit and Humour, 1. 6. 40. M. J. Scott-Taggart, "Socratic ItOny and Self Deceit," Ratio, vol. 14, no. I, (1972):

I-IS, at p. 13. 41. Ibid., p. 13. 42. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines 0/Empiricism, 1I.244-7, trans. Rev. R. G. Bury, (Loeb

Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Vniven;ity Press, 1939). Thanks to Stephen Menn for drawing this example to my attention.

43. The incongruity theorist might take inspiration from this idea, for one of the main problems we observed with the incongruity theory is that there are many incongruities, like plastic fruit, which we don't find funny. The distinction between the funny and non-funny incongruity cannot lie in the incongruity per se but in how each affects us or not as the case may be. Adding that the incongruity that is involved in humour produces pleasure is, as we have seen, an inadequate gesture, for again we take pleasure in non-funny incongruities. Pleasure is an effect of finding something funny and so cannot be part of the explanans of

35 WHAT PART OF 'KNOW' DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

why something is funny. The incongruity theorist needs to identify a motivational factor that operates prior to pleasure to explain why a perceived incongruity strikes the mind as surprising and beyond comprehension in the way in which jokes are. Despite the incon­gruity, plastic fruit is neither surprising nor beyond logical comprehension. See below.

44. The most prominent advocate of the view that emotions are judgements is Robert Solomon. See his "On Emotions as Judgements," American Philosophical Quarterly 25, (1988): 183-91.

45. Rene Descartes, us Passions de l'Ame. a.70. Oeuvres de Descartes, vol. I-XII, (",), ediled by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (paris: Leopold Cerf, 1897-1913).

46. Compare MOrreall's grounds for dismissing emotion from the realm of humourous experience on the grounds that, unlike emotional attitudes, amusement inter alia (a) entails no positive or negative evaluations of the situation, (b) does not require that one have any beliefs about the actual properties of the objects, and (c) is purposeless in being uncon­cerned with the practicalities of particular situations. Humour and Emotion, pp. 298-301. Morreall does not consider the possibility of an emotion that is evaluatively neutral, which may stimulate the acquisition of, rather than presuppose the existence of beliefs about the object, and which is not defined in tenns of some practical and particular aim it may have in the context.

47. Rene Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, a. 75. 48. And then there are the general problems, familiar to philosophers and cognitive sci­

entists, associated with supposing that there are rules or rational procedures which, when applied, tell us what to attend to or what we should believe. See Gilbert Harman on the ir­reducibility of rationality to rule-following or logic, in his The Nature of Morality, (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1977), chs. 10 and 11, and Reasoning, Meaning and Mind, pt. I, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), and discussions of the ''frame problem" in Zenon Pylyshyn, ed., The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem and Other Problems ofHolism in Artificial Intelligence, (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1987) and n. 34 above.

49. As Charles Cowden Clarke remarked, however, in 1871, against the anti-punsters of his day, "No man ever despised a pun who could make one," Quoted in Martin, The Triwnph of Wit, p. 44.

50. This pun was created by Damien Ledwich, master punster, who is also responSible for the title of this paper and many (non-plastic) fruitful discussions about humour. Many thanks.

51. On the humanising and uplifting effects of self-ridicule see Simon Critchley's On Humour, (New York: Routledge, 2002), ch. 7.

52, This paper was much improved as the result of comments and suggestions provided by the advisory editor, Laurence Goldstein, for which I am most grateful. Thanks also to Peter King, Damien Ledwich, Chris Martin and Calvin Nonnore for helpful early discus­sions.