Comicality ...

What is it for something to be comic? What is comicality? The literature here is small by comparison, but many of the great philosophers had something to say, if only in hurried passing. Moreover, there is even appreciable unanimity. Most everybody who wrote on the formal questions (ut supra) put forward some version of what the textbooks call the 'incongruity theory.' Here the form of the comic is the contradictory, the mismatched, the disparate, the out-of-place. (Stanford's mediocre encyclopaedia entry speaks of multiple theories of humour competing, but they don't really compete at all. For one is a theory about what it is for something to be comically laughable, another is a theory about why we laugh derisively, another is a theory about laughter's long-gone evolutionary wherefrom, and so on. They're all in different categories.)

But the above needs straightly to be qualified, for not all such contradictions are comic (and some are even tragic). Going back at least to Aristotle (Poetics V), the specifying mark of the comic has been painlessness: painless contradictions are comic, whereas painful are tragic. (It is a perverse sense of the comic that laughs at physical injury or at mental suffering.)

So. Mismatch seems to be of the essence of the comic. And that means that it is essentially juxtapositive, essentially relational. In an excellent footnote to the Postscript, a footnote that takes up most of the page for several pages, Johannes Climacus writes on the fundamental relationality of the comic: 'The comic is a relation, the misrelation of contradiction, but painless' (XII.1.514). And that's not a bad definition of comicality. Genus: misrelation. Species: painless. (All cases of comicality are cases of painless misrelationality. But may we also convert that proposition? Put differently, a painless misrelation is necessary for the comic, but is it sufficient? It's hard to say. Some cases of the same don't seem particularly comic. But the comic comes in degrees, like the tragic. And maybe such cases are of but low comic degree.)

Let's have some examples:

'Hamlet swears by the fire tongs; the comic is in the contradiction between the solemnity of the oath and the reference that annuls the oath, no matter what the object is ...

'Holophernes is said to be fourteen and one-fourth feet tall. The contradiction is essentially in the latter part. The fourteen feet is fantastic, but the fantastic does not as a rule speak of fourths ... The person who laughs at the fourteen feet does not laugh appropriately, but the person who laughs at fourteen and one-fourth feet knows what he is laughing at ...

'When a man applies for a permit to go into business as an innkeeper and the application is turned down, this is not comic. But if it is turned down because there are so few innkeepers, it is comic, because the reason for the application is used as the reason against it. For example, there is a story about a baker who said to a poor woman, "No, mother, she does not get anything; there was another recently who didn't get anything, either. We can't give to everybody." The comic is in his seemingly arriving at the sum total "everybody" by subtracting.

'When a girl applies for a permit to go into business as a public prostitute and the application is turned down, this is comic. One correctly considers that it is difficult to become something respectable ... but the turning down of an application to become something contemptible is a contradiction. Of course, if she receives a permit, that also is comic, but the contradiction is a different one, that the legal authority shows its powerlessness simply in showing its power, its power by granting the permit, its powerlessness by being unable to make it permissible ...

'When a soldier stands in the street staring at the glorious window display in a fancy gift shop and comes closer in order to see better, when with his face really aglow and his eyes fixed on the finery in the window he does not notice that the basement entrance extends inordinately far so that he vanishes into the basement just when he is about to have a proper look—then the contradiction is in the movement, the upward direction of the head and gaze and the underground direction down into the basement ...'

At the end of the multi-page footnote, after forwarding several more specimens of the comic, J. Climacus writes: 'Let these examples suffice, and everyone whom this footnote disturbs may leave it unread.' Here the comic is in the displacement of the disclaimer, coming only when it is too late to act upon.

As a rule, comedians are poor philosophers of comedy. That is, they know when something is comedic—if they're any good—but they don't really know why. (They know the comic by praxis, not theory.) And, no, comedians needn't be philosophers of comedy, (just as such philosophers needn't be comedians). Nonetheless, many comedians nowadays could do with some philosophical lessons. For example, stand-up comedians could learn that explicitness is not in itself comic, that ribaldry and scurrility are not in themselves shortcuts thereto. Explicitness may serve comicality as matter to form, but that goes for anything and everything. It is comic when a dear-old punctilious grandma speaks with sailorly coarseness. And, contrarily, it's comic when a roughneck vulgarian speaks with fastidious politesse. (Think of how masterfully G. Bernard Shaw plays with these themes in his Pygmalion.) But non-comic anecdotes are not made comic by being translated into the explicit, not eo ipso. An anecdote is comic if painless misrelations are present, inasmuch as they're present.

More later.