Phenomenology

If You Have To Explain It, It Isn’t Funny – Laughing Immediately With Merleau-Ponty, Part 2 (Adam Blair)

This the second part of a two-part series. The first part can be found here. Merleau-Ponty wants to avoid the division of latent and manifest content, instead pointing to the inability to speak as a simple, unified condition. Both the shock of the earthquake and the maternal prohibition caused a refusal of coexistence on the part of […]

Phenomenology

If You Have To Explain It, It Isn’t Funny – Laughing Immediately With Merleau-Ponty, Part 1 (Adam Blair)

This is the first section in a two-part series. The three predominant theories of humor within the Western canon — relief, incongruity, and superiority— reveal something about why we laugh when we do. There is a central insight to each of the three theories, regarding the psychological, conceptual, and social forces at play in our experience of […]