On Humour

Simon Critchley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781135199029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Does humour make us human, or do the cats and dogs laugh along with us? On Humour is a fascinating, beautifully written and funny book on what humour can tell us about being human. Simon Critchley skilfully probes some of the most perennial but least understood aspects of humour, such as our tendency to laugh at animals and our bodies, why we mock death with comedy and why we think it's funny when people act like machines. He also looks at the darker side of humour, as rife in sexism and racism and argues that it is important for reminding us of people we would rather not be.

Index

abjection 96–8, 102

abstraction 87–8

Adorno, Theodor 19, 36

Aesop 29, 31

alienation 43

Allen, Woody 98

anaesthesia 87–8

anamnesis 86–7

Anaxagoras 25

Animal Farm 31

animals 25, 27–31, 34–8, 41–3

anthropology 2, 5, 17, 27–8, 65–6

anti-depressants 101–2

anti-Semitism 75

Aristotle 2, 25, 98–9

assent 85–6

Auden, W. H. 16–17

Bakhtin, Mikhail 44, 51, 82

Batailles, Georges 105

bathos 6–7, 37, 47

Baudelaire, Charles 9

Beckett, Bill 52

Beckett, Samuel 25, 32–3; ethnicity 57, 73; post-colonal theory 47–50, 52; super-ego 105–6, 109–11

being 42–5, 109

Berger, Peter 17, 31–2, 42, 83

Bergson, Henri 2, 4, 25; laughing machine 55–9, 61; sensus communis 87

Bernhard, Thomas 36–7

bestiality 29–31

Bible 26–7, 42

Blazing Saddles 48

body 7–9, 41–52, 60

Bogart, Humphrey 98

Breton, André 9–10, 31; ethnicity 71, 73; laughing machine 57; super-ego 94

Britain 68–9, 71–3, 84–5

Brooks, Mel 48

buffoonery 82, 83

Cana, wedding at 26

Carnival 82

cartoons 14, 31, 55–6

cathexis 100

Catholicism 83

Chaplin, Charlie 57–8, 67

Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine 104–5

Chaucer, Geoffrey 29, ...