Chapter 8 - On the Theory of the Comical

Summary

My theory of the comical is also based on the opposition between intuitive and abstract representations that I laid such particular emphasis on in the previous chapters; and that is why the remarks I now offer in clarification of this topic belong here, although the arrangement of the text would dictate that they should appear only later.

The problem of the origin of laughter (an origin that is everywhere the same) and its proper meaning was already recognized by Cicero, who also immediately abandoned it as unsolvable. (On the Orator, II, 58.) The oldest attempt I am aware of to give a psychological explanation of laughter is in Hutcheson's Introduction into moral philosophy, Book 1, ch 1, § 14. – A somewhat later, anonymous text, Treatise on the physical and moral causes of laughter, 1768, is not without its use in giving the subject an airing. Platner, in his Anthropology, § 894, collected together the opinions of philosophers from Home to Kant who attempted an explanation of this distinctively human phenomenon. Kant’s and Jean Paul’s theories of the comical are well known. I do not think it is necessary to demonstrate their falsity, because anyone who tries to refer a given instance of the comical to them will in the vast majority of cases be immediately convinced of their inadequacy.

As I explained in my First Volume, the comical always comes from a paradoxical and therefore unexpected subsumption of some subject matter under a concept that is, however, different from it, and so the phenomenon of laughter always signifies the sudden perception of an incongruity between a concept and the real subject matter that is thought through it, and thus between the abstract and the intuitive. The greater and more unexpected the incongruity is to the person who is laughing, the more uproarious his laughter will be. Accordingly, with everything that causes laughter there will always prove to be a concept and a particular, which is to say a thing or event that certainly can be subsumed under this concept and therefore thought through it, but nevertheless does not remotely belong there in any other or more pertinent respect, and is clearly different from everything else that is thought through this concept.