Diotima: The Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
For example, both the situations of understanding and not understanding a
joke may be humorous. When a comedian tells a joke, people usually find it funny
because they “get” the punchline. However, the popular concept of anti -humor is
funny for the exact opposite reason — a punchline never arrives. 19 If these situations
are opposite in nature, yet both result in humor, it would seem that anything has
the potential to qualify for humorhood. From wit to stupidity, from long-drawn out
anecdotes to brief one-liners, from perfect imitation to hyperbolic parody —
humorous things seem like they can be incredibly variant in kind. Plus, these are
the situations we know already to warrant the name of humor — what about the
situations that no one anticipates will be humorous until they evidently are such? If
there are types of humor we know to differ so vastly as well as sources of humor
that exist without our knowledge or anticipation, it must be impossible for humor to
have such a set of necessary and sufficient conditions common to all its occurrences.
I would like to respond to this objection by taking a cue from George Dickie,
specifically his response to Weitz’s argume nt. Dickie takes up an opposite stance to
Weitz: art can be defined. He claims that even without perfect identification of the
defining feature, there must be “some one or more other features of works of art
[that] distinguish them from nonart.” 20 Applying this argument to humor, I am
particularly attentive to the ability to distinguish humorous experiences from non-
humorous ones. If there existed no objective condition for the occurrence of humor,
we would constantly be attempting to discriminate the humorous from non-
humorous, saying, Did I find that funny? With such discrimination, we might then,
find ourselves to be “humored” constantly, or never at all. As discussed earlier, this
is evidently not the case with humor, as it is known upon immediate experience and
not by contemplation. Humor is an experience, but it is an objective experience.
When someone is humored, it is not possible to truthfully deny the experience;
similarly, when someone is not humored, it is not possible to truthfully claim they
19 “Anti - Humor,” TV Tropes, accessed December 8, 2022, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AntiHumor. 20 George Dickie, “Defining Art,” in Philosophy for the 21 st Century: A Comprehensive Reader, ed. Stephen M. Cahn (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), 785.
Volume VI (2023)
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