Humor Theories

I found Immanuel Kant’s theories of humor and laughter interesting but this may be because I did not fully understand them. Kant gave examples of stories that we laugh at and find pleasure in but I never laughed at them or understood why I should be laughing. So, I tried to understand his explanation of why people laugh. He said that in one story we laugh “not because we deem ourselves cleverer than this ignorant man, or because of anything in it that we note as satisfactory to the understanding, but because our expectation was strained and then was suddenly dissipated into nothing” (48). I think Kant is trying to say that we often laugh at times when someone says something that is unexpected. We laugh because at the end of a story that someone tells we see a “falsehood immediately.” He suggests that we may not be laughing because someone is being funny but we might be laughing at ourselves because we falsely assumed that the person telling a story was going to say something different. He suggests that sometimes when we laugh we may be laughing at our own assumption. Kant says that the person telling a story or joke “requires a certain seriousness in the presentation” because our reaction to what we assumed this person was going to say is what makes us laugh. 

It is interesting how seriousness can play a big part in something being comical. When someone is being serious but in a comical way I believe it is called sarcasm where someone will be serious and use irony for mocking purposes. I think that this humor is funny, however I’m pretty gullible and I don't always get the punchline. I think it may be because I try to make it a goal of mine in general, and not in funny situations, to take people as seriously as possible. When thinking of humor and laughter, I would say the exact opposite is seriousness. Without seriousness, comedy and laughter would not exist but I find it interesting that Kant believes that using seriousness to your comical advantage is at times required. Understanding seriousness also makes sense when Kant says that the talent in humor is being “able to voluntarily put oneself into a certain mental disposition, in which everything is judged quite differently from the ordinary method” (50). We judge seriousness differently just as we judge ourselves and others differently in funny situations.