Ethical reflections on humor: A serious matter
Type de matériel :
90
Under what conditions could humor, considered here as a Platonic pharmakon, become a remedy for the pathologies of the social body rather than a poison that aggravates them? From the coercive humor of entertainment television to philosophical humor, we will enter these moral and equivocal territories of humor, where Bergson said he did not want to venture. By considering the context and the different components of the humorous situation of utterance, the outlines of an ethics of humor can be traced, one that does not make it into a weapon of mass discrimination but, on the contrary, an inclusive and participative, or dialectical practice. Ultimately, humor allows us to apprehend the humanity of humankind in a manner that is both empathetic and antipathetic, and deeply unstable. Hence the need to define a subtle posology that does not fall into the obscure trap of consensual humor. Finally, humor reveals the “true-lying” of hypocrisy, a necessary evil for social cohesion, and unravels the artificial links of the “spirit of seriousness” in the Sartrean sense.
Réseaux sociaux