Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Humour

Philosophy and Humor

An introduction by Tim Madigan.

“It is worth noting that Wittgenstein once said that a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes (without being facetious).”
Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir

The above passage is rather ambiguous – does it mean that Wittgenstein said such a thing in a nonfacetious tone, or would the work he is proposing be nonfacetious? (An uncharitable soul might say that Wittgenstein succeeded in writing such a book – Philosophical Investigations.) Such are the types of linguistic analyses which philosophers are prone to engage in, which is no doubt why the profession is often seen as being humorless in the extreme.

Must philosophers be unfacetious? Can one tell a joke without having to also examine what it means? In a recent book Ted Cohen, a noted philosopher from the University of Chicago, ably demonstrates that it’s possible to appreciate a funny anecdote on its own terms, while also exploring the complicated set of conditions that must be met for it to elicit laughs. Consider the following example he gives:

“The things about German food is that no matter how much you eat, an hour later you’re hungry for power.

…