Michael Joseph Mulvey

Introduction: Humor (the expression of and ability to perceive that which is funny), comedy (the typically humorous reconciliation of difference), and laughter (the physical response to humor) have lacked neither qualitative commentators in the humanities from Plato and Aristotle to Immanuel Kant nor quantitative theorists in the social and natural sciences. Human opinions on things lighthearted are often complex and contradictory. The philosopher Henri Bergson argued that there is nothing fun about the funnies; indeed, he designated laughter a repressive function. All laughter sought to humiliate individuals and social groups at the margins of society. We only laugh to correct impermissible behaviors. In contrast, the political theorist Johannes Huizinga maintained that democracy and freedom ceased to exist in an absence of laughter. A German theorist has went so far as to conclude that Nazism emerged because Germans simply lacked a comedic tradition akin to France, Britain or the United States! Only people who cannot take a joke systematically murder other people.

Psychology alone has produced five major theories of humor: psychoanalytic, superiority, arousal, incongruity, and reversal. Anthropologists and neurobiologists have been no less productive in attempting to trace humor and laughter’s evolutionary roots as a defense mechanism in complex primate society. Historians and sociologists have spent decades researching how social groups relied on humor and laughter to subvert hierarchies from carnival to charivari and cat massacres. Economists have remarked how comedy has become a passive object of consumption over the last century. Your laughs mean big bucks! Technical advancements gave a means for capitalism to subsume humor and laughter to the financial incentives they generated in a market thereby transforming an active or interactive social practice into a mass commodity for passive consumption through radio, film, and television. They argued that financial investors desire to maximize profit had led to comedies stretching geographically outward and socially downward. We might ask now if the freedom of the Internet has freed what we find funny from corporate?

Our mini-term task is to think about these theoretical arguments in practice as we remind ourselves that jokes seldom travel well across time or space. What was once funny to our grandparents is now offensive. We will arm ourselves with a comprehensive knowledge of humor, laughter, and comedy before we go out into the real world and ask why is so funny? Our task is also to move beyond the classroom to converse with different North Carolinians to discover what role laughter has in their lives from politics to religion and neurobiology.

Course Description: Why do humans laugh? What makes us laugh? What has made us laugh in the past? Why do we laugh at other humans? How do we feel when people laugh at us? Does laughter heal? Does laughter harm? Are there subjects and situations that can never be funny? Do humans share a common sense of humor? Are all our senses of humor culturally specific? How do people make other people laugh? Why do we enjoy comedies? Why have people enjoyed comedies? Is comedy a dying art? Is comedy conservative? Is comedy liberal? In this class, we explore the powers attributed to humor, laughter, and comedy, experience them firsthand, and study their uses inside contemporary North Carolina. One thing is promised—you will never take humor, laughter, and comedy for granted again!

Course Objectives:
This interdisciplinary course introduces students to a broad range of literature and voices on the subjects of humor, laughter, and comedy in philosophy, history, sociology, psychological, anthropology, political science, literary criticism, and neurology. We will place our theoretical knowledge into a dialogue with the practice of humor, laughter, and comedy in literature, film, and contemporary life. We consider why humans first laughed on the East African Savannah and the tension between “getting the joke” and being the victim of an insult. Students will leave the course with a nuanced understanding of how humor humiliates, hurts, heals, subverts, and speaks truth to power.

Course Format:
This course is organized around presentations, group activities, and group discussions of assigned texts (articles, essays, book chapters, films, comics, etc.) and encounters with individuals across the Triangle. We discuss texts to make intellectual connections, hone your public speaking skills, and assure comprehension of the subject matter. Our theoretical knowledge will equip students to have an informed discussion about the role of humor, laughter, and comedy in practice with individuals from outside NCSSM walls.