In his very interesting book, titled "Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human", Yale University Professor of Psychology Paul Bloom attempts, with considerable success, to explore how the basic evolutionary endowment of human beings manifests itself in the material, social, and spiritual realms. It is a very worthwhile read and I highly recommend it to anyone seriously interested in our human nature and its inherent possibilities.
There is, however, at least one point where Bloom goes sadly astray. It is in the very last section of the last chapter ("The Body and Soul Emotion") of the third section ("Part III - The Social Realm") and it is titled "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (pp. 182-186 in the paperback edition). It is his discussion of humor. It makes it abundantly clear that Bloom is rather dreary fellow with no real experience of the reality of children and laughter.
Bloom engages the notion that humor lies in any sort of "shift of perspective" or "incongruity between what we expect and what actually happens." As Bloom sees it, this just won't do. The problem with this, as he explains it, is:
"The missing ingredient is a certain type of wickedness. No serious student of laughter could miss its cruel nature. The psychologist Robert Provine notes that despite laughter's sometimes gentle reputation, it can be an outrageously vicious sound. Not so long ago, the elite would find it endlessly amusing to visit insane asylums and laugh at the inmates; physical and mental deformity has always been a source of amusement. There was no shortage of laughter at public executions and floggings, and the sound is often an accompaniment to raping, looting, and killing in time of war. . .
"We're getting there, but it is too simple to see humor as a shifting frame of reference with an added dash of cruelty. It needs to be the right type of cruelty . . .
"The important ingredient here is a loss of dignity; someone is knocked off his pedestal, brought down a peg. Laughter can serve as a weapon, one that can be used by a mob. It is contagious and involuntary; it has great subversive power, so much so that Plato thought it should be banned from the state. . .
"Humor can also have a particularly direct relationship to the interplay between bodies and souls. Humor involves a shift in perspective, and one of the most striking shifts is when we move from seeing someone as a sentient being, a soul, to seeing the person merely as a body. . .
"In his study of American slapstick, Alan Dale notes that every funny act falls into one of two categories - the blow and the fall . . .
"Disgust, religion, and slapstick all traffic in what Dale calls `the debasing effect of the body on the soul.' But they do so indifferent ways. Disgust focuses on the body, dismissing the soul; religion, at least some part of the time, focuses on the soul and rejects the body. And slapstick is the richest of all, as it deals with both at the same time, showing a person with feeling and goals trapped in a treacherous physical shell . . .
"If you are in a bind and need to make a two-year-old laugh, the best way to do so is to adopt a surprised expression and fall on your ass."
So, in summary, according to Bloom, no laughter originates in joy, only in cruelty, however cleverly disguised. Humor always involves the denigration of others.
Bloom is dead wrong, as anyone with real experience of a happy child, laughing at the waves of the sea, at the joy of moving, at the sun and the wind can see directly. And those who, like Bloom, object to humor and who see it as only grounded in cruelty or disrespect, say, provide prima facia evidence that they take themselves far too seriously; that they are, in fact, whatever their capacities and attainments, still under the spell of what some like to call `the commanding self'. In this respect, they are companions of the hide-bound religious literalists, not of the Deity they `piously' invoke.
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Amazon Customer
Inaccurate and imprecise
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 6, 2004
