Plato and Hobbes Analysis/Response

    After reading through these selections for the first time in preparation for this project, I was left with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. The overall takeaway seemed to be an overwhelmingly negative one—first, in Plato’s writing, he states that laughter is a behavior rooted in vice and malice, an expression of superiority when we witness self-ignorance in people less powerful than ourselves—or people lowering themselves below us in their acts of self-ignorance. “Malice is the source of the pleasure we feel at our friend’s misfortune” (Plato 13), he says. Centuries later, the English philosopher takes this idea and doubles down on it, further emphasizing and condemning the petty and hostile aspects of human nature. In his magnum opus Leviathan, Hobbes states that “Sudden glory, is the passion which makes those grimaces called laughter” (Hobbes 19), meaning that the source of man’s amusement comes from either an affirmation of his own superiority, or a display of someone else’s inferiority to himself. The thoughts of these two philosophers alongside Aristotle form the base of the Superiority Theory of humor, which is a belief that human beings are in a constant struggle for power, and view the failure of our competitors (anyone besides ourselves) as a personal victory. The Superiority Theory argues that laughter is nothing more than an expression of our joy at believing ourselves to be better than others. This concept, in my own experience, is not entirely true.

    There are certainly some instances in which humor can be found in the misfortunes of others: America’s Funniest Home Videos presents entire segments within their show of unlucky swimmers falling off of diving boards, and overenthusiastic dancers falling out of handstands, always to the soundtrack of an uproariously entertained audience. Many standup comedy routines center on comedians either making fun of themselves or people they encounter—Sebastian Maniscalco, for instance, has a set about how foolish he thinks people look when they’ve just gotten off a waterslide. The entire world of slapstick comedy in television and movies such as Tom and Jerry seem to be derived from the Superiority Theory—the humorous quality of these properties coming from a petty satisfaction at watching an evil or otherwise mean-spirited character suffer. My favorite movie of all time, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, centers its comedy largely on Ferris’s ability to embarrass and bewilder those around him—often rude, snooty adults, standing as representatives of the boring adulthood he adamantly refuses to succumb to. I do believe that the Superiority Theory shows itself to work best when the viewer has reason to believe the person suffering deserves it in some way, that they are below the audience witnessing their misfortune—Principal Rooney of Ferris Bueller gets kicked in the face by a teenage girl, yes, but not until after he’s poisoned her dog and broken into her house.

    Where I feel Superiority Theory doesn’t hold weight is the circumstances in which the audience is not given a good enough reason to dislike or laugh at the butt of the joke. When I was a child, I couldn’t bring myself to watch Tom and Jerry at all—as a matter of fact, I still struggle to enjoy it as an adult. Tom is just doing his job, I thought as a child. Why should Jerry take such sadistic pleasure in torturing him when Tom is trying to keep his owners happy by ridding their house of mice? Now, as a doting owner of a cat myself, I can’t stand the episodes where Tom’s yells of pain are actual meows, versus a man’s voiceover. I feel no sense of superiority over someone’s cat when he steps in a mouse trap and hurts himself—only pity, and anger at that criminal mastermind, Jerry. Perhaps it is best to say that I agree more with Plato’s concept of humor than Hobbes’s: “Delighting in our enemies’ fortunes is neither malicious nor wrong” (Plato 12), he writes, where Hobbes considers man to laugh at friend and foe indiscriminately, with the same root cause behind it, insecurity. “Much laughter at the defects of others,” he says, “is a sign of pusillanimity” (Hobbes 19). For Plato, it seems that only one’s laughter aimed at allies comes from this same place. Laughter at enemies, though, comes from an internal sense of justice and revenge.