No Laughing Matter: On the Importance of the Body in Plato’s Humour

Abstract

To grasp the humour in the Platonic dialogues, it is useful to observe their use of the body. This article proposes leveraging knowledge from the art of dance, an embodied art par excellence, to explore how the body makes an audience laugh. Often considered in the past as an art dealing with serious or tragic subjects, dance, like philosophy, can have a lighter side. An analysis of how humour appears in dance is used as a heuristic device to uncover three ways humour is transmitted through bodily elements in Plato’s dialogues. The choreographers focused on – the Swede Alexander Ekman and the Czech Jiří Kylián – work with a type of elevated humour that is in fact close to that of Plato. In both cases, ballet and Platonic dialogues, humorous and serious elements can be present in the same work, as if to balance the conveyed message and make it more relatable to the audience.