CLASS 130 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Philogelos, The Symbolic
Document Summary
Philogelos = the laughter lover (pdf on gauchospace) Most jokes are about how stupid and sex-crazed women are. Ancient barber shop joke: barber says "how do you want your hair cut? guy responds, "in silence" Lots of slave jokes as well, because ancient greece and rome were slave societies. Explaining that humor goes against our expected patterns of cognition. Cicero says that humor is about saying something offensive in an inoffensive manner. Superiority (plato and aristotle; hobbes) i. e. laughing at someone who slipped on a banana peel because you did not. Humor depends on a feeling of superiority regarding the object of the joke. The object needs to be weak and ignorant to provoke feelings of superiority of superiority. Plato claims that our amusement depends on a mixture of (the subject"s) pleasure and pain. Aristotle says the audience of a comedy looks down upon its characters as "inferior" to them. Laughing when you become relieved that something bad didn"t happen.
