that jokes have no moral content of their own, and that applying ethical reasoning to humor is a category mistake (something akin to asking about the typical smell of triangles).Īs Carroll immediately pointed out, historically humor and ethics have often come into contact - and conflict. Carroll set out to explore the ethics of humor, and particularly to examine what he called the “skeptic’s” position that humor is a-moral, i.e. The bartender gave the philosopher a quizzical look, and Plato said, “What can I say? She looked better in the cave.” The relationship between humor and philosophy has been explored for a long time, with the authors of the popular Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar.: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, Daniel Klein and Thomas Cathcart, arguing that good jokes are structurally similar to good philosophical arguments: they start with a familiar, apparently non-threatening, situation lead the listener toward a path he thinks he can see and then they suddenly take a sharp turn to deliver either the punchline or a surprising conclusion.īut I was reminded of a different connection between humor and philosophy this past semester, while listening to a fascinating (and funny!) talk by my colleague at CUNY’s Graduate Center, Noël Carroll (who, interestingly, holds not only a PhD in philosophy, but one in cinema studies).
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