Last Laughs and Dead Ends: How to Get Death’s Goat, or Let’s Put the “Yin” Back in Dying

The Philosophy of Humor Yearbook 1 (1):195-209 (2020)
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Abstract

The article’s purpose is to illustrate ways in which renowned philosophers, statesmen, and poets—as well as family members and friends of this author—utilized humor to express fearlessness of or contempt for death, or indeed to mock others’ fears of dying or tendencies to treat death too seriously. If Sigmund Freud was correct in hypothesizing that humor is the ego’s defense against life’s affronts, and if death poses the greatest possible affront to life, then jokes about death are the strongest protests we can lodge against our own mortality.

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10.1515/phhumyb-2020-0014

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Lou Marinoff
City College of New York (CUNY)

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