Ayn had very little humor in her psychological makeup, and was suspicious of humour on principle. She roundly criticized the view that a sense of humor is an important human trait, and projected an especially withering contempt at the suggestion that one should be able to laugh at oneself.
[. . .]
[T]hose who knew her often had the chastening experience of telling her a joke which they thought was hilarious—then being greeted by blank look of bewilderment—then having to give a lengthy explanation of what was the presumed humor. Having to explain anything to Ayn Rand was an unusual experience; having to explain one’s humor made one less than eager to repeat the next hilarious story one heard.
— Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand, pp. 172-173.
I’ve been reading a bit about humour. Specifically, theories of what makes things funny. Examples include the Incongruity Theory—which says humour arises from certain perceived incongruities between our presuppositions, or the way the world is versus the way we think it should be—, the Play Theory—which says humour is a type of play—and Gimbel’s Cleverness Theory, which says humour is intentional, conspicuous, playful cleverness.
One theory that hasn’t received much attention is Ayn Rand’s. While Rand’s theory bears some similarity to the Superiority Theory—on which which humour expresses a joke-teller’s own sense of superiority (over other people, other things, or what the joke-teller was like in the past)—it’s distinctive enough to merit a blog post.
Rand’s theory is well summarised by Leonard Peikoff, her official intellectual heir:
Humor is the denial of metaphysical importance to that which you laugh at. The classic example: you see a very snooty, very well dressed dowager walking down the street, and then she slips on a banana peel . . . . What’s funny about it? It’s the contrast of the woman’s pretensions to reality. She acted very grand, but reality undercut it with a plain banana peel. That’s the denial of the metaphysical validity or importance of the pretensions of that woman. Therefore, humor is a destructive element—which is quite all right, but its value and its morality depend on what it is that you are laughing at. If what you are laughing at is the evil in the world (provided that you take it seriously, but occasionally you permit yourself to laugh at it), that’s fine. [To] laugh at that which is good, at heroes, at values, and above all at yourself [is] monstrous . . . . The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.
So the theory comes in two parts: a descriptive part, and a moral part. The descriptive part of the theory tries to describe what humour is; the moral part tries to pin down when—and why—some humour is inappropriate. To save you time, I won’t comment on the moral part. Instead, I’ll just ask: did Ayn Rand correctly—or even approximately—analyse what humour is?
When analysing a concept, the goal is broadly to pin down its necessary and sufficient conditions. For example, people used to think KNOWLEDGE had three necessary conditions—truth, belief, and justification—and that those conditions are jointly sufficient. Anywhere and always, if a belief is true and justified, it’s knowledge. (That’s been refuted now, but it gets the idea across.)
If we’re analysing HUMOUR, the goal is broadly the same: pin down the necessary and sufficient conditions on something’s being humorous. Humour is a messy phenomenon, so a good analysis might have counterexamples; but there shouldn’t be too many counterexamples and they shouldn’t be too obvious.
That in mind, here are two pretty serious counterexamples to Rand’s theory.
I. Puns
As categories of humour go, puns are a big one. A theory of humour can’t easily account for puns is like a normative theory of Going Awol which leaves out why you ought to subscribe.
Now, consider these Tim Vine jokes, and ask yourself whether “the denial of the metaphysical importance of that which you laugh at” is what most plausibly characterises them:
“The advantages of easy origami are two-fold.”
“Conjunctivitis.com – that’s a site for sore eyes.”
“Exit signs? They’re on the way out!”
“Velcro? What a rip-off!”
Not only is it hard to see how Rand’s theory could accommodate these puns in a natural way; it’s hard to come up with any way it could, even if that way was unnatural and implausible. Puns show Rand’s theory doesn’t give a necessary condition for humour.
II. The Laughing Buddha
Suppose you’re chatting with a Buddhist philosopher, and he gives you an intimidating battery of arguments that the Self isn’t metaphysically important or fundamental. To your horror (you’re a pasty Western normie who believes the self is metaphysically important and fundamental), your find yourself utterly convinced. You reflect on your newfound belief that the self is neither metaphysically important nor fundamental and let out a nervous laugh.
By my lights, that’s not an example of humour. But Rand’s analysis—as it stands—predicts that it would be.
You might object that Rand’s use of ‘metaphysical’ in her books is a lot broader and more loosely defined than the analytic metaphysician’s use of ‘metaphysical’ might be. But even if her use of ‘metaphysical’ is broad and fuzzily defined, it’s presumably broad enough to include the analytic metaphysician’s sense of the term, at least in the case given above. (After all, when Rand talks about the ‘Primacy of Existence’ and ‘A is A’ stuff, she’s explicitly trying do the kind of ‘metaphysics’ regular metaphysicians are doing).
You might also object that the kind of laughter in the case—as explicitly stated—is nervous, not humorous. But nervous laughter needn’t come at the expense of humorous laughter; a taxi driver might suddenly brake and scream: “YO MAMA’S SO SHORT, YOU CAN SEE HER FEET ON HER DRIVER’S LICENSE!”. In this case, assuming you found the bit hysterical, you’d laugh humorously and nervously. It’s not an either-or. So by stipulating that the laughter was nervous, I wasn’t ruling humour out the case by definition.
You might still object: “But if the laughter in the case isn’t explicitly said to be humorous, humour is removed from the get-go”. But that would be a mistake. If you build into the case that the nervous laughter was humorous, you build in the the case the very thing we were trying to see if the case exhibits: humour.
This case shows Rand’s theory doesn’t give us a sufficient condition for humour.
Do you have any counterexamples? Comment down below!
(Also, on to topic of Ayn Rand and humour, check out this sketch from Funny or Die):
I feel like this fails to explain most humor. Like just pick a random joke: it probably won’t be considered funny. Example: norm Mac Donald’s famous moth joke.