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In surveying the question, we can say that every philosophical definition of Humor and the Comic has the following common characteristics: |
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(1) We are dealing with a very imprecise experience, so much so that it goes under various names, such as the Comic, Humor, Irony, and so on. We are never sure whether it is a question of different experiences or of a series of variations on one fundamental experience. We start by believing that this experience has at least one physiological manifestation, which is laughter, only to realize that there exist several instances of the Comic that are not accompanied by laughter at all. |
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(2) The imprecision of every definition is such that every single study on the Comic and on Humor ends up by including also experiences that common sense tells us are not comic but tragic. And paradoxically, one of the components of the Comic is pity, or tears. |
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(3) Not one of those who have written on the Comic could be called a Comic writer. Among them we do not find, for instance, either Aristophanes or Lucian, or Molière or Rabelaisnot even Groucho Marx. On the other hand, we come across the following: |
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(a) as serious a thinker as Aristotle, who introduces the Comic precisely as a final explication of the Tragic. By a fluke of history, that part of the Poetics which deals with the Comic was lost. Was this a mere accident? At any rate, let me present my own "humorous" hypothesis: as a thinker, Aristotle was lucid enough to decide to lose a text in which he had not succeeded in being as lucid as he usually was; |
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(b) a fussy, moralizing, austere philosopher such as Kant; |
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(c) another philosopher who was just as austere, boring, and not at all inclined to joke, such as Hegel; |
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(d) a romantic, morbid, whiningalthough reasonably desperatepoet such as Baudelaire; |
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(e) a somewhat gloomy and existentially anguished thinker such as Kierkegaard; |
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(f) a few psychologists with little sense of humor, as, for instance, the German Lipps; |
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