How to Stop Living and Start Worrying by Simon Critchley

Author:Simon Critchley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley

Humour

CARL CEDERSTRÖM: Humour is a recurring theme in many of your books and in 2002 you published a book dedicated exclusively to the topic of humour. Could you begin by describing how humour can be understood in relation to those other themes you’ve been engaged with?

SIMON CRITCHLEY: I had this ambition at a certain point to write a book on impossible objects. These would be objects which philosophy could not exhaust, objects which refused and were refractory to philosophical categories. And the three areas I was thinking about were poetry, music and humour. You don’t need a philosopher to explain music; you don’t need a philosopher to explain a poem; and you don’t need a philosopher to explain the nature of humour. These are practices, or activities, that seem to resist philosophical argumentation and comprehension. It was the very resistance to philosophical comprehension that first attracted me to those three areas. And I’ve done work on music, even made a little mid-life crisis music with my friend John Simmons, and written a little book on poetry, which we’ve already mentioned. But humour is maybe the theme I’ve gone furthest with of those three. The first thing to say is that we don’t need a philosophy of humour to explain the nature of humour. And anything that a philosopher could say about humour is in a sense a priori redundant, and – again – that’s what interests me. It says something about the limits of what philosophy or conceptuality can approach. Humour interests me in particular because it’s a praxis, an actually existing social practice, it’s something that we do and understand; but it’s a practice which has this capacity for reflection built into it. Humour is practically enacted theory. It’s an actually existing practice, that people do, which invites us to take up a theoretical view of ourselves, of others and the world. So the way I put this is that humour is a philosophical view of the world lived unphilosophically, or at least unprofessionally.

CC: You underscore in your book that humour allows us to change the situation in which we usually find ourselves.

SC: Yes, I think what humour does is to invert our normal understanding of things. For example, jokes tear holes in our usual views of the empirical world. When humour works, it does so by producing a disjunction between the way things are and the way they are represented by the joke. They change the situation in which we find ourselves. That could be done in a straightforward linguistic way, as when Groucho Marx says in Duck Soup, ‘I could dance with you till the cows come home. On second thought, I’d rather dance with the cows till you come home.’ There’s another great Marx Brothers line, from A Night at the Opera, in a dialogue that goes back and forth really fast, where Chico says to Groucho: ‘What’ll I say?’, and Groucho says, ‘Tell them you’re not here’, and then Chico says, ‘Suppose they don’t believe me?’, and Groucho says, ‘They’ll believe you when you start talking.

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