Why So Serious: On Philosophy and Comedy

Russell Ford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367892111
• eBook ISBN: 9781351363020
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Western philosophical tradition shows a marked fondness for tragedy. From Plato and Aristotle, through German idealism, to contemporary reflections on the murderous violence of the twentieth century, philosophy has often looked to tragedy for resources to make suffering, grief, and death thinkable. But what if showing a preference for tragedy, philosophical thought has unwittingly and unknowingly aligned itself with a form of thinking that accepts injustice without protest?

This collection explores possibilities for philosophical thinking that refuses the tragic model of thought, and turns instead to its often-overlooked companion: comedy. Comprising of a series of experiments ranging across the philosophical tradition, the essays in this volume propose to break, or at least suspend, the use of tragedy as an index of truth and philosophical worth. Instead, they explore new conceptions of solidarity, sympathy, critique, and justice.

In addition, the essays collected here provide ample reason to believe that philosophical thinking, aligned with comedy, is capable of important and original insights, discoveries, and creations. The prejudicial acceptance of tragic seriousness only impoverishes the life of thought; it can be rejuvenated and renewed by laughter and the comic. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

michael naas

PLATO AND THE
SPECTACLE OF
LAUGHTER

This essay will be, alas, rather out of step with much of what comes before and after it in this volume. It will not be in the least bit funny, I am sorry to say, and at its best only mildly entertaining. This will be due in large part to my own limitations, to be sure, but also to the fact that, as I see it, comedy must be for philosophy no laughing matter. As someone who takes very seriously the warnings of Plato with regard to comedy, I wish to show here that Platonism – and thus philosophy – is unthinkable without a vigorous critique of comedy and, ultimately, an emphatic rejection of it. And, as I will argue, there is nothing funny or ironic about this critique and nothing more serious than this rejection.

I will thus be taking issue with what appears to be the underlying premise of this collection, namely, a certain compatibility of philosophy and comedy or, worse, philosophy’s unfortunate neglect of comedy and urgent need for it. I will defend here, without humor, irony, or detour, the honor of philosophy against the implicit plea that philosophy take comedy more seriously or that it itself become more comedic. My intention is thus to give a very different answer to the guiding question of this collection, “Why so serious?” – a question posed to philosophy, I take it, by those who would like philosophy to take itself less seriously by being more serious about comedy.

As a first sign of protest or resistance, then, I would like to take issue with the vehicle that has been used to present this volume, the cover illustration of the owl of Minerva with a lipsticked or blood-besmirched grin. Neither joker nor jackal, the owl of Minerva must never, I believe, be represented mocking or preying; neither vampire nor vulture, she must never be shown gorging or gloating. A symbol of wisdom and philosophy, she must always be represented watching over and protecting, smiling knowingly, without malice or conceit. For if she always looks down upon us from above, and sometimes even seems amused, she never laughs in derision, since she knows, and it is this knowing that makes her so serious, that makes her reject comedy, and that allows her sometimes, and sometimes in the most serious of places, to laugh ever so lightly, ever so knowingly, with the gentleness and understanding of the gods.

As I will argue, Plato was the first to present us with this view from above, this philosophical vision of the whole tragedy and comedy of life, the first to have given us a theory of laughter and of comedy that affords us at the end of the day, and only at the end of the day, such a modest and gentle laugh. This will thus be, I am not joking – and you will have been sufficiently warned – a very unfunny paper about a very serious thinker who is not just an example but the exemplar of the very serious subject of philosophy, which has been from the very beginning and must today remain dead serious about comedy – dead serious because comedy is, in the end, a matter of life and death, which is why I risk appearing here to be a real killjoy in what would otherwise be a very amusing and entertaining collection.

Now before trying to show what Plato thinks the laughable or the comic is and why he warns us so seriously against taking it so seriously, or why we should take it only seriously, never frivolously, since it is so dangerous, let me head off from the outset an obvious objection. As every Introduction to Philosophy student well knows, Socrates could be very funny, wickedly funny, bitingly sarcastic or ironic in his confrontation with, say, a Euthyphro or an Alcibiades, a Meno or a Thrasymachus, a Callicles or a Dionysodorus. How, then, it might be asked, could anyone whose principal dialogical character is so funny be so serious about comedy, to say nothing of scornful or disdainful of it? In what follows, I will try to demonstrate that while Plato’s Socrates – and Plato more generally – is indeed very funny, his comedy is always in the end motivated, directed always towards a very serious end, always part of a pedagogical strategy or textual economy that inscribes both the objects of humor and the makers or spectators of it in relationships of ignorance and knowledge, blindness and insight, vice and virtue. In other words, comedy is always part of the very serious economy of philosophy, and when it risks becoming anything more than this it must itself be rejected, scorned, laughed off the stage. As part of a philosophical economy that trades in knowledge and ignorance, comedy or laughter more generally must always be at the expense of some and for the benefit of others. And as long as it is at the expense of, say, the ignorant, the bad, the ugly, in short, the non-philosophical, and to the benefit of their opposites, then comedy will be, we will see, acceptable, even desirable, but as soon as it begins to operate in excess of this economy, as soon as it begins to serve other ends and so begins to become comedy in a strict and independent sense, it must be roundly denounced.

To begin, then, let us try to ask what it is that Plato considers to be funny, laughable, comedic, ridiculous, absurd, or worthy of derision – notions that are not exactly synonymous but are always related in the dialogues. To approach this question, we will need to look at Plato’s very systematic use of two families of words, the first of these coming from the root gel-verbs such as gelaō (to laugh, laugh or sneer at) and katagelaō (to deride, scorn, or mock), the adjective geloios (laughable, ridiculous, absurd), the adverb geloiōs (ridiculously, absurdly), the noun gelōs (laughter, a subject of laughter), and so on, and the second from a root that is readily recognizable in its English cognates, from the noun kōmōidia (comedy) to the adjective kōmōidikos (comic).¹

To try to understand, then, what the comedic or the laughable is for Plato, we must begin with the laughable things that Plato himself would have found readymade in the culture around him, generally acknowledged comedic moments or situations that then get taken up in the drama of the dialogues in a relatively straightforward way. For instance, there were in Plato’s time, not unexpectedly, well-known jokes, comedic phrases, and amusing rejoinders that get cited or taken up more or less unchanged by Plato in his dialogues, along with commonly acknowledged comedic situations, laughable or absurd positions or circumstances.² Think of Alcibiades’ drunken entrance in the Symposium, which everyone, including Alcibiades, recognizes to be a cause for laughter, as is his earnestness in trying to attract the amorous attentions of Socrates.³ Great comic writer that he was, great comic philosopher that he was, Plato was able to integrate this readily recognizable comedic situation into his dialogue, at once reinscribing and revising the more typical comedic scenario of the lover rather than the beloved vying for the other’s attention with absurd or laughable discourses or gestures.⁴ As an example of the more common comedic scenario of the lover making a fool of himself before his beloved, there is the amusing, almost slapstick scene of the Charmides, where several older men hastily shift seats, some even falling off their benches, as they try to make room for the beautiful young Charmides to sit beside them.⁵

In addition to jokes and commonly acknowledged comedic situations, the things people say can sometimes appear ridiculous or laughable because of who they are or, more often, because of the contrast between their words and their deeds.⁶ It is thus funny, ridiculous even, in Plato’s lexicon, to hear someone gloating about his ancestors to people whose ancestors are even more illustrious;⁷ it is funny or ridiculous to hear a mediocre thinker or practitioner of any art boasting about his abilities when it is clear to everyone that he would be put to shame by a truly great thinker or practitioner of that art. While such false conceits, based, as they are, in ignorance, should really be a cause for concern and no laughing matter, as Socrates says in the Philebus, they nonetheless often make us laugh and give us pleasure (Philebus 49e–50a). And occasions for such laughter are in no short supply, for as Socrates says in the Euthydemus, there are few truly worthy men in any endeavor and most men can be seen “making a ridiculous show at their respective tasks” (Euthydemus 307b).

In addition to all these examples of people being unwittingly funny, laughable in spite of themselves, there are, of course, those who make a living out of being funny. There are, first of all, professional comedy writers and those who resemble or imitate them. There are those who, like Aristophanes, are known for the comedies they write and for the “absurd” or ridiculous things they say and do in everyday life (Symposium 213c). We thus see Aristophanes in the Symposium at once make up a story regarding Eros that is at first blush rather funny – even if there is a rather tragic moral to it – and become subject to a prolonged hiccupping fit that causes great amusement in his audience (Symposium 189b–d). Plato was obviously well acquainted with the comedies of Aristophanes and other comedy writers, just as he knew the works of that other group of professional quasi-comedians, the sophists, whose linguistic displays were often supposed to be both educational and humorous.⁸ In both cases, he also clearly understood the potentially destructive influence of such men and their humor on the city.

Popular jokes, amusing words and phrases, funny situations, ridiculous people, professional playwrights and sophists – this is just a very small sampling of everyday humor in Athenian life, things that the average Athenian, or at least the educated Athenian, would have found funny and, importantly, would have used the lexicon of humor or comedy to describe, things that are then included and put to work by Plato’s dialogues but are not substantially transformed by philosophy or for a philosophical audience. But then there are situations of discourse, of language or of dialogue, that bring us closer to a more uniquely philosophical use or inscription of comedy. If Plato often uses the lexicon of comedy to describe commonly acknowledged comedic words or situations, he uses it even more frequently to describe certain aspects of dialogue or philosophical discourse. Sometimes this happens simply by transferring an everyday comedic situation into the context of philosophical dialogue. When in the Republic Socrates feigns to be unable to find the fourth of the four virtues they have been looking for, namely justice, and then all of a sudden says he has found it, he compares their situation to this readily recognizable comedic moment from everyday life: “the thing apparently was tumbling about our feet from the start and yet we couldn’t see it, but were most ludicrous, like people who sometimes hunt for what they have in their hands” (Republic 432d). We all recognize the comedic aspect of someone searching for something that is right before their eyes – the house keys that are right in their hands, the glasses sitting on top of their head. Plato is thus reinscribing here a readily recognizable comedic situation into a distinctly philosophical or dialogical context. And notice that what is funny about this particular situation is that someone, a spectator, sees something that someone else does not, or better, the spectator sees that this someone else does not see what he or she does. Such seeing will turn out to be a key factor in what I will call the spectacle of comedy or laughter in Plato.

This brings me to the most common use of the lexicon of humor and laughter in Plato’s dialogues, the attribution of the laughable, the ridiculous, or the absurd to the processes or results of dialogue or argument. Arguments themselves are thus often characterized by Socrates, the Stranger, or the Athenian – and there is no coincidence that it is so often these three – as leading to absurd or, as if this were a quasi-synonym, illogical results. It would be a ridiculous or absurd physician, a geloios physician, says Socrates at Protagoras 340d, who makes his patient sicker rather than better. At Republic 392d–e, it is a ridiculous or absurd teacher who makes things more obscure rather than less, since it is absurd or ridiculous to aim for one thing and, because of one’s ignorance or lack of ability, obtain the opposite. It would thus be “ludicrous,” as the Athenian argues at Laws 801b, for one to pray to the gods asking for a bad thing thinking it is good, even if, as Socrates argues in Alcibiades II, this is precisely what men often do when they lack knowledge of the good: they pray for something thinking it is good, get it, and are ruined by it. What is particularly significant about this example is that, in Plato’s vocabulary, such prayer is not just paradoxical but ridiculous, absurd, ludicrous, laughable, though also, of course, tragic, which is why, as we will see, comedy and tragedy are, for Plato, always so closely aligned.

It is thus certain arguments or forms of argumentation that are laughable or absurd, as are those who engage in such argumentation.⁹ The Eleatic Stranger of the Statesman argues that it would be ridiculous to accuse someone of being unjust or ignoble for having made others more just or more noble, even if they did so by force (Statesman 296d). Tautologies or arguments that at first blush look like tautologies are thus often called absurd, as are, of course, arguments ad absurdum, arguments that Plato or Plato’s Socrates exposes to be funny in others or that he even knowingly develops in order to be ridiculous by design and so shed an even more absurd light on his opponent.¹⁰ And then there are certain terms that appear ridiculous, for example, the sophist as a “knowledge merchant,” since the argument that precedes the co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Why So Serious? On Philosophy and Comedy
• 1. Plato and the Spectacle of Laughter
• 2. Homage to Penia: Aristophanes’ Plutus as Philosophical Comedy
• 3. Prostrating Before Adrasteia: Comedy, Philosophy, and “One’s Own” in Republic V
• 4. At Least They Had an Ethos: Comedy as the Only Possible Critique
• 5. Absolute Knowing: Consternation and Preservation in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida
• 6. Something Mechanical Encrusted on the Living or, “Que Signifie le Rire?”
• 7. Humor, Law, and Jurisprudence: On Deleuze’s Political Philosophy
• 8. Go Bleep Yourself! Why Censorship is Funny
• 9. Quantum Andy: Andy Kaufman and the Postmodern Turn in Comedy
• 10. Being Funny: Ontology is a Queer Subject (or, Tractatus Cucumber Saladicus) (a Zen Maoist Koan)
• Index