In the book’s opening chapter, Eagleton begins with 10 pages on laughter, its official topic, before wheeling through Freud and other thinkers for 25 more. He is rambling and inconclusive, but he is always entertaining. His book is about the semiotics of laughter and the history of humor, not just what it means to be funny. Eagleton doesn’t quite avoid its pitfalls, but he does a lot besides. It’s a bemusing bid, an almost comical collision of metaphysics and mirth. If there is nothing wrong with explaining jokes, something very different is afoot when the theorist of humor bursts upon the scene and ventures to explain the essence of the funny. When we attempt to explain a joke, what we are doing is continuous with this it is what stand-ups do, to wonderful effect, on Stuart Goldsmith’s podcast The Comedian’s Comedian. The British comedian Stewart Lee, who may be the best stand-up working today, makes a trademark of analyzing jokes on stage in order to critique the audience response. In fact, Eagleton goes meta: he begins by noting that many writers on the topic begin by noting this and he notes that it isn’t always true. Like many writers on this topic, Terry Eagleton begins his new book, Humour, by owning the complaint that to analyze humor is to kill it. These reasons aren’t just causes, triggers that inhibit or provoke an unintelligible laugh. We can give reasons why something is funny or why it is not, why a joke works or why it doesn’t. Since the subject of the sentence is singular, the verb should be “walks” not “walk.”Īll of which is to show that jokes fall in the scope of rational explanation. How could a single person be so many things? But the joke is unoriginal, and the setup is technically flawed. “Hello, Professor Eagleton,” the barman says, “What will it be?” If this joke is at all funny, that is because it leads one to expect an interaction between five people who turn out, absurdly, to be one. A CRITIC, A COMIC, A HISTORIAN, a philosopher, and an amateur theologian walk into a bar.
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