on the historicity of humor (or lack thereof)

It’s an issue I’ve often reflected on, and tonight at dinner it was on my mind again, because of Vasari.

In addition to being a revolutionary artist, Giotto is praised by Vasari as having a solid intellect more generally. Additional support for this comes from Giotto’s close friendship with Dante, one of the mightiest thinkers of any age, and someone who presumably would not have suffered fools for long. Nonetheless, when Vasari quotes several anecdotes supposed to illustrate Giotto’s wicked wit, I find them all fairly stupid, and so would most of you.

We know that plenty of humor ages well. Aristophanes is still funny. Plato remains a comic genius by the standards of any age. All the old Zen monk enlightenment stories can still make us laugh. Don Quixote is hilarious. And in my opinion (but please don’t draw the wrong conclusions from this) Sade is still perhaps the funniest writer of all time.

But when it comes to daily life wisecracks, the great smartalecks of the past can often leave us cold. There’s also that famous incident in which Thales is mocked by “a clever Thracian housemaid renowned for her wit.” The example given of her ferocious wit is that when Thales was contemplating the stars and fell into a well, she quipped that “Thales is so busy contemplating the sky that he doesn’t even notice the ground beneath his own feet,” or however it was worded. Hard-ee-har-har. We laugh today only to mock the stupidity of this remark. (As Stanley Rosen once remarked sardonically in class when discussing this story: “It was easier in those days to gain a reputation for wit.”)

There are more recent examples, though here I would expect to face more disagreement. Slapstick is supposed to be the lowest form of humor, but when watching old Marx Brothers films again recently, my sense was that Harpo’s slapstick is aging better than Groucho’s language games, which now often seem a bit corny.

And, remember the supposed “golden years” cast of Saturday Night Live, with Ackroyd, Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner et al.? Well, when I went back and watched some of those clips again recently, I was severely disappointed.

On a related note… I have to think that the funniest parts of Plato, Shakespeare, and Cervantes are funny everywhere. But look just a bit lower than that level, and there is often a mutual national incomprehension in matters of humor. One example is that I have yet to laugh at or even understand a single Egyptian editorial cartoon. They are completely lost on me.

Another example, which I heard long ago from a gifted but erratic source, is that when the Monty Python people played America for the first time, they were confused and even somewhat traumatized– the Americans were laughing in all the wrong places. (If the story isn’t true, it ought to be.)

Tonight I was leaning toward the conclusion that this duality (between the timeless and the utterly local) is true of almost everything, not just of humor. But at other times I have leaned the other direction and seen it as a special characteristic of the comical.

Oh yes… I find almost all the jokes used as examples by both Bergson and Freud in their books on humor to be quite pathetic. Abraham Lincoln, who was as smart as anyone should ever want to be, found endless mirth in the humor writings of Petroleum Nasby– but every quote I’ve ever seen from Nasby bordered on idiotic.

I’m going to keep chewing on this. Humor is, in my opinion, one of the most central philosophical topics. To twist an old Heideggerian cliché: “Tell me what makes you laugh, and I will tell you who you are.”