How Can Philosophy Improve Your Sense of Humor?

The Philosophy of Humor Yearbook 5 (1):227-255 (2024)
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Abstract

It is often said that humor is a powerful tool that is helpful for living a good life. When saying this, we assume that humor is used sporadically for chance encounters with the spontaneously funny. In what follows, however, I lay out the educational premises of a new worldview, which, by making systematic use of self-referential humor in order to handle events that are not immediately funny, leads to a stable state which philosophers call the good life. The multifaceted philosophic notion of the “good life” will be reduced to the principles proposed below; but humor as presented here can help achieve any philosophical ideal, even one that is not in the spirit of the view articulated here. However, the form of philosophic humor that I advance in this article requires education, mainly self-education, as is often the case with much successful education. Thus, as intimated by existential philosophers, I maintain, first, that laughter can and should be learned; and second, that the discipline of laughter is philosophically significant because laughter enables to endorse new norms and to change one’s attitude towards oneself, others, and the world. To achieve the educational aims of this article, the theoretical clarification of the worldview that I introduce, Homo risibilis or the ridiculous human being, is illustrated by exercises that help implementing it.

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References found in this work

Sceptical Essays.Bertrand Russell - 1929 - Humana Mente 4 (14):263-264.
Philosophy’s Attitude towards the Comic. A Reevaluation.Lydia B. Amir - 2013 - European Journal of Humor Research 1 (1):6-21.
Taking the History of Philosophy on Humor and Laughter Seriously.Lydia B. Amir - 2014 - Israeli Journal of Humor Research: An International Journal 5:43-87.
Humor as a Virtue.Lydia Amir - 2002 - International Journal of Philosophical Practice 1 (3):62-79.

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