Laughing at the Body: Approaches to a Performative Theory of Humor

Abstract

In prevalent theories of the comic, whether literary, philosophical-aesthetic, linguistic or psychological in origin, the humor of the human body plays a subordinate role. It is addressed as a humor of situation or movement, as ›lower‹ or (for the literature up to 1700) farcical humor, and therefore used as a blurry sub-type. The body is imponderable for such a concept of humor that, since Kant and Jean Paul, is subsumed under aesthetic perception and excludes the body or, at most, treats it as a phenomenon represented by language. The body is also unwieldy for linguistic and semantic theories of humor or of the joke, as they can be found in some types of cognitive models of linguistic or logic incongruity, overlap or opposition of scripts, in interdisciplinary humor research.