Enduring Jokes: Humor and Politics Meeting – September 18, 2014
For our first meeting, we discussed Joss Whedon’s 2012 adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, the Aristophanes play The Assembly of Women, and short selections from Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics and Hobbes’ Leviathan. We asked whether certain aspects of humor are funny regardless of time or culture and found that some ancient Greek jokes still make us laugh. We discussed Hobbes’ theory that we laugh at the foibles of others to feel better about ourselves and Aristotle’s distinction between tragedies, where people appear better than they are, and comedies, where people are shown at their silliest and least dignified moments. We found the banter between Beatrice and Benedict to defy these explanations of comedy. We discussed the use of humor in Much Ado about Nothing – both the original and the film – and thought about how closely the plot brushed against a tragic outcome (Romeo and Juliet). We found that jokes about the body and its functions, about the relationship between the sexes and about incompetent civil servants are an enduring feature of Western humor, ancient and modern, but left with many questions about why we laugh.
