August 15, 2008
The Art of Laughter
In the spirit of summertime and for 'something a little different' here's a conversation with Jos Houben, an internationally acclaimed performance artist, writer, director, producer, and teacher at the Jacques Lecoq theater school in Paris. Laughter is a gift, really, and we should share it more often. Even, perhaps especially, in politics. Many thanks to Jos for taking time to talk with me — he's an absolutely delightful person. Total runtime an hour and three minutes. Enjoy!
Comments
Very interesting. I'll inform myself more about Jos Houben.
I had also theorized about what lies beneath a laughter in the past. Why are funny things funny?
The conclusion I reached was something like this:
Seeing others fail makes us feel good about ourselves. Someone falls down, demonstrates incompetence, we feel relatively more competent.
Obviously it's much more complex, this doesn't explain by itself why people can laugh at their own mistakes or some special forms of laughter-triggering funny things(like linguistic tricks). There are many different factors in play. But at the moment, I still think this is the foundation of it all.
His example of how it's not funny when a tramp falls down, while it's funny when the president does was great; she's already fallen. That and the example you gave about how your friend was getting free meals because she fell, both support my view. Other people's demonstrations of their incompetence affects our own self-image. After we see others fail, we pity them more if we do not perceive them as "above us". If they were above us, we just feel good that they fail. Or something like that...
And when things get too serious (someone gets seriously injured, economy collapses etc.) we realize that others' incompetence begin to affect our lives more in negative ways. Our priorities change.
I might leave another comment later where I try to express my views more clearly. I also sort of missed the last 10 minutes. I'll have to listen to it again. But it was pretty cool really...
Posted by: Sadun Kal | November 14, 2008 3:46 PM
I just did a little research about this subject and there is enough info about it online, you just have to Google 'humor philosophy' or something like that. Here's a decent summary:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/h/humor.htm
I still find the superiority theory superior to others when it comes to explaining the logic behind it. It's the one that makes most sense in the evolutionary, biological sense to me. I suspect that the forms of humor which seem inconsistent with the superiority theory (i.e. wordplay) are born just as side-effects of the real mechanism behind humor. But hard to say...
Posted by: Sadun Kal | December 19, 2008 10:12 PM