3 - On the matter of wit

Summary

I can very well suppose men may be frightened out of their wits, but I have no apprehension they should be laughed out of them.

Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis; An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour

It may be noted by the way that there is no better start for thinking than laughter. And, in particular, convulsion of the diaphragm usually provides better opportunities for thought than that of the soul. Epic theater is lavish only in occasion for laughter.

Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer”

Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically. As it draws an object to itself and makes it familiar, laughter delivers the object into the fearless hands of investigative experiment – both scientific and artistic – and into the hands of free experimental fantasy.

Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”

Because they criticize the emergent political economy of capitalism and sometimes parody the experimental and descriptive procedures of natural science, the “Tory satirists” of the early eighteenth century are often considered as anti-materialist writers. If materialism means greed or denial of immortality, they are. If materialism means a belief that the questions most often worth writing about are, to use an important Swiftian word, “fundamental” problems of the relations of bodily beings to their environment, products, and each other, then they clearly are not anti-materialists. At this date it should not still have to be recalled that the point of Swift's “Celia, Celia, Celia shits” is not that Celia does but that Cassinus thought she didn't.