St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) underscored Aristotle’s conclusions about humor and amusement. Although with emphasis on the positive elements considered by the Greek philosopher. He compared sleep to laughter. He argued that while sleeping provides physical rest, laughing provides psychological rest. This priest also referred to the social benefits of laughter, relating it to play. He considered the game, fundamentally the play on words —the joke—, as virtuous as work. Virtuous and even divine. The divine nature of the game is another aspect of Aristotelian thought enriched by St. Thomas Aquinas. He did it in commentaries and books like Summa Theologica.
A related fact. St. Thomas Aquinas borders on exaggeration when it seems to criminalize seriousness. He deduces that a boring person, without the sensitivity to appreciate a good joke, is an irrational person. And in his system of ideas, the irrational leads to vice.
Parisian Voltaire (1694 – 1778), originally named François-Marie Arouet, was an advocate of laughter. He emphasized that joking doesn’t always mean making fun of others or putting others down. He stated in his Philosophical Dictionary that the child laughs innocently, unable to feel superior, without the intention of degrading those who amuse him.
Voltaire wants to dismantle the extreme according to which laughter springs from the sense of superiority and uses an anecdote from his childhood. He relates that when he was eleven years old he read Molière’s Amphitryon, a text that made him laugh uncontrollably. «Did I laugh with arrogance?» He asks the readers. And he remembers that when they are alone, people do not laugh out of vanity.
Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) maintains that laughable situations usually start from absurdity or inconsistency, something for which the human brain is not sufficiently prepared. The sender’s joke is followed by a moment of useless concentration by the receiver. The tension to which the mind is subjected unleashes laughter. The brain spends a considerable amount of energy trying to explain the nonsense, and laughter relieves its exhaustion.
The Prussian philosopher summed up by assuring that laughter appears when the expected suddenly becomes nothing. A feeling of disbelief, of disappointed expectation, which instantly leads to comedy. This is the gunpowder that triggers laughter according to Kant, who develops his thesis in Critique of Judgment (1760).
Although Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) rejected philosophy in many of his writings and statements, his contribution is unquestionable. Despite not being commonly considered a philosopher, his thought feeds modern philosophy in several ways. This Austrian psychologist and thinker attributes to laughter the ability to free the body of negative energy.
His book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) classifies jokes into two main groups: innocent and tendentious. In it, Freud examines the nature of the joke, attributing darkly emancipatory qualities to it. Through comedy, the comedian and his audience approach the forbidden without suffering consequences. Taboo topics related to sexuality or eschatology are aired with intimate satisfaction. The double entendre, the mockery, the libido, converge in the middle of the laughter. “Aggression and general hostilities about an ethnicity in a society can be freely expressed through the joke”.
As the title of the book indicates, the role of the unconscious repeats in this approach to Freud. Which characterizes most of his creation.
For Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951), philosophy is a method of analysis closely linked to language, of which humor is an indivisible part. Some researchers consider him the founder of analytic philosophy. “Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world”: this is the beginning of a famous allusion by Wittgenstein to Nazi Germany, where political jokes were banned.
According to this Austrian philosopher, nationalized English, humor has the virtue of revealing that truth is an absurd concept in itself. Wittgenstein’s statement that a rigorous philosophical work should be structured with jokes is famous. The idea that one day everything will be known was very amusing to him.