"The Odd One In - On Comedy" by Alenka Zupančič (2008)

No matter what you think about her basis in Lacanian psychoanalysis ("It doesn’t stop not being written. Since it cannot be written, it doesn’t stop not being written, it doesn’t stop, it persists as necessary in its very impossibility,") even if you're no neophyte comedy wonk, you come away with the impression that no one in the history of philosophy nor the history of comedy has ever thought about it all this intensely.* Four stars.

*"Human beings are composed neither of the biological and the symbolic, nor of the physical and the metaphysical—the image of composition is misleading. Human beings are, rather, so many points where the difference between the two elements, as well as the two elements themselves as defined by this difference, are generated, and where the relationship between the two dimensions thus generated is being constantly negotiated.

There is no 'pure life' or 'pure Symbolic' prior to this curious intersection. The generating point of the Symbolic is this paradoxical joint, and the Symbolic as a wholly independent, autonomous realm is something produced—it is produced at the periphery of the movement generated by the intersection, and retroactively affecting its own point of generation—its own 'birth,' so to speak. The nature of this intersection is such that we can precisely not see it as an intersection; we cannot put a finger on it and say: Voilà, it is here that 'nature' is becoming 'culture.' This passage can be noticed and established only from the latter point, that is to say, from where it has already taken place. In other words, the double circular movement described corresponds in fact to the movement along the surface of the Möbius strip: we start, say, at an extreme point of one side, and without ever passing to the other side, we end up at an extreme point of it. This brings us back to the point—or, more exactly, two points—made in Part I of this discussion of comedy. First, what the topology of the Möbius strip reveals is that the missing link that structures our reality is not a missing link between two neighbor elements, the connection between which would thus be interrupted—instead, its very missing is the linkage between two neighbor elements; it is what makes it possible for them to 'fit' into each other. Second, comedy forces this constitutive missing link to appear as something—not by trying to provide its own version of the (always fantasmatic) moment of the passage of one side into the other, but by producing a short circuit between two sides, and sustaining it ('playing with it') as a possible articulation of the impossible. It is here that comedy fully affirms itself as the genre of the copula that articulates together, in its specific way, the two heterogeneous dimensions of the same reality."

"Pleasure: A History" Edited by Lisa Shapiro (2018)

Was reading a philosophy book about pleasure in and of itself actually pleasant? No, in fact at times it was downright maddening. Nonetheless, did I want to read it? Yes. Would I say reading it was worthwhile? Actually, very much so. In a way, it was exactly what I was looking for. But would I recommend that people pick up and read a philosophy book for themselves? Not if you don't like being driven crazy. Adjoining to the above contradictions, does it make sense that I would highly rate a book that filled me with deeply unpleasant feelings, that I wouldn't recommend to others, and in fact would advise to actively avoid, that spends a tremendous amount of time logically explaining how in the end it's impossible to understand certain things? (Why do we seek pleasant things? <24 pages later> It is because they are pleasant.) No, probably not. Four stars.

"Laughter - Notes on a Passion" by Anca Parvulescu (2010)

The refreshing thing? This book does not contain one single joke, and never strains for a laugh, in that cloying, tweedy way you're usually forced to endure in these sorts of things. What it is instead is a rather dry survey of the philosophy of laughter in the 20th century. You'll have to get past a long introduction focusing on the physicality, mechanics, and early philosophy of the laughter response before you get to chapters focusing on laughter and the Black experience, laughter and avant-garde philosophy, laughter and feminism, and laughter and the cinema. Pretty interesting, right? A view of the 20th century through the strict lens of laughter?—that's why I thought this academic work deserved a shoutout. And it's not at all a difficult read, to boot. The hangup is, you spend a great deal of time asking yourself: What's the point? Why this lens? She notes that laughter is a sort of "violent mystery" that deserves more exploration—in my lifetime alone I feel there was a seismic shift in general attitudes towards laughter, for better or for worse—but her somewhat scattershot "notebook" only seems to offer a prism of smaller insights at the expense of overarching ones. The story, as I'm forced to deduce, is one of serious thinkers attempting to grapple with the implications of a seizing, interruptive, highly contagious force: Is it the spark of a revolution? Is it an oppressive balm? Is it a vestige of human purity? Or is it a corruption? Of course, the answer is all of those things and more. But Parvulescu seems to have her thumb on "revolution" which, given the depiction of laughter as an immense, distorting, elusive, God-given power, in the end feels lamely reductive. Three stars.

"Jokes - Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters" by Ted Cohen (1999)

Well, it only gets interesting at the very end, when this University of Chicago philosophy professor defends offensive jokes; I'm not sure he does a good job of it though (basically saying that correcting the joke doesn't meaningfully solve any problems.) As for the rest of this short book, it frankly doesn't feel all that insightful, for instance, saying that jokes require some conditional knowledge/emotion from the receiver in order to work, or that Jewish jokes often play with absurd logic perhaps because Talmudic interpretation involves twisting logic games. There are a great deal of street jokes reprinted here, including a Polish joke I once heard Norm Macdonald tell, but I would argue that's not necessarily a good thing. I mean, I was promised philosophy. Two stars.

"Immortal Comedy - The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature, and Life" by Agnes Heller (2005)

It claims to be one of the few books to examine comedy from a philosophical perspective (even Aristotle, as far as we know, avoided it.) If you count literary criticism, that's certainly not true. What I'll say is it's one of the few books I've run into that tries to distinguish comedy as a high art form, analyzing plays, novels, jokes, paintings, and movies along the way; it seeks to identify comic works that achieve the sublime (as in sublimating innocuous laughter towards a higher, noteworthy aesthetic effect) which according to her definition would even exclude works like "The Simpsons" (memorable jokes, like fireworks, that always lead back to the status quo.) Whether or not that interests you, I suppose, is your business. But I will say her argument that our current comedy rarely does anything new, and in fact, steals liberally from past comedic innovations (see "Arrested Development's" similarities to commedia dell'arte, or even Charlie Kaufman's similarities to 20th-century existentialists like Kafka) is a rather damning one. That said, the main criticism I have of this extremely interesting, wonderfully accessible meditation on high comedy (tell an aspiring comedian that you consider comedy to be an art form and they'll consider you cuckoo, believe me) is, sure, that's all well and good, but is Samuel Beckett really all that much of a knee-slapper? Maybe not. In fact, Beckett sounds like he might be downright irritating. Yes, I may just be ridiculing something I'm too unsophisticated to understand, but it's not my fault I wasn't born into money, or into a culture that doesn't consider literature to be an impractical, time-wasting luxury.* Five stars.

*"All people are 'thrown' into a concrete social universe. The human genetic endowment is programmed for social life, but there is nothing in the genetic endowment which would encode a newborn for this or that particular, concrete social environment into which he or she is thrown. Philosophically speaking, there are two initial a priories in human life: a social a priori (the world into which each is thrown) and a genetic a priori (the inherited endowments of the thrown being herself). Since there is no initial connection between the two, and since only the experience of any single person can forge this connection, it is philosophically correct to speak of two a priories, given that they are prior to experience for all human newborns. To use a term coined by Hannah Arendt, this is the condition of human natality. In the process of socialization those two a priories must come together; they must dovetail in order for the individual person even to survive. But—and this is my hypothesis—the two a priories cannot be entirely dovetailed; there remains a tension between them. To use another kind of metaphor, an unbridgeable abyss remains between the two a priories. I call this existential tension and an existential abyss. According to the conception of laughing and crying presented here, both of these are reactions to the impossibility of a real jump over the abyss; laughing and crying are responses to the failure of any complete dovetailing between the social and the genetic a priori."

"Breaking Up [at] Totality - A Rhetoric of Laughter" by D. Diane Davis (2000)

It's basically applying Jacques Derrida's concept of deconstruction to collegiate composition, rhetoric, and writing instruction (with a lengthy detour into feminism, and little-to-no discussion of comedy.) Reading it 25 years after we both spent time at the University of Iowa (me as a student, she as a professor), it actually seems a lot of the deconstruction she advocated eventually came into reality, though perhaps not in the way she had hoped—the breaking apart of our existing structure, the breaking apart of an oppressive totality (to Davis, breaking apart = laughter) would admit a wide diversity of unheard voices, a wide diversity of unheard thoughts, into the conversation; listening to this "laughter" was a way to combat fascism, the domination of one voice, and thus would open up new paths forward as a community. What she didn't anticipate was that a majority of those unheard voices with unlistened-to thoughts would break up our existing structure by actively choosing someone who blatantly promised totalitarianism. If this loose summary/analysis feels unnaturally compressed, it's because the book is extremely involved—I don't think any discussion of post-structuralist/deconstructionist philosophy can possibly not be involved. That's the thing though: after reading this book, post-structuralist/deconstructionist theory has never made better sense to me. (What’s funny is if you really wanted to understand this very heady subject, Derrida is perhaps the last person you should ever turn to.)* Four stars.

*"There can be no doubt about it, the deaths of God and Man have left us abandoned in the 'world'—if that term, world, can still be used with any significance at all. The 'foundations' on which we have attempted to construct meaning—about living, about dying—have crumbled, broken up. We have been abandoned to a free-fall. But the aim of this project has not been to dis-cover an-other toehold, to discover another way to stop the fall. Rather, the call issued here is for an abandonment to this abandonment, for a giving of oneself up to it affirmatively. Abandonment is, after all, what we share; the only commonality among we-singularities is our finitude: that we are infinitely singular and all alone together. To abandon oneself to abandonment in, for instance, a fffffit of laughter, is to experience the very limits of finitude, the place where singular beings touch, irrepressibly. Such experiences propel us, in a flash, beyond the fascist within and expose us to an/other community, without essence or telos, a community that always already is, that always already shares, that always already operates on an ethic of care for the Other beyond the transcendental one.

...This work will not help anyone 'gain time.' It attempts only to open an/Other sensibility … an/Other 'logic,' an/Other 'sense,' an/Other way of thinking about being-with-one-another-in-the-world. Not through the reinscription of community, not through the creation of new myths. But through the exposure of what those myths exscribe, through tiny interruptions that could give community back to us … sans the 'myth of community,' in indiscriminate flashes."