The Efficacy of Comedy

University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School December 2019 The Efficacy of Comedy Mark Anthony Castricone University of South Florida Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the Philosophy Commons Scholar Commons Citation Castricone, Mark Anthony, "The Efficacy of Comedy" (2019). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/8013 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Efficacy of Comedy by Mark Anthony Castricone A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Joanne Waugh, Ph.D. Charles Guignon, Ph.D. Joshua Rayman, Ph.D. Iain Thomson, Ph.D. Cynthia Willett, Ph.D. Date of Approval: December 9, 2019 Keywords: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Aristotle, Kant Copyright © 2019, Mark Anthony Castricone Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... ii Introduction: The Efficacy of Comedy ...........................................................................................1 Chapter 1: The Birth of Comedy ..................................................................................................13 1.1. Aesthetics and the Art before Art ..............................................................................13 1.2. The Tractate and the Point of Poetry .........................................................................21 1.3. What Aristotle Would Have Said with Righteous Indignation and Confidence ........28 1.4. Conclusion .................................................................................................................36 Chapter 2: This Kant Be Funny: Aesthetics, Beauty, and Comedy ..............................................37 2.1. What about Comedy in Art? ......................................................................................37 2.2. Unintelligent Design and Alterity ..............................................................................40 2.3. Kant on Comedy ........................................................................................................43 2.4. Let’s Get Morreall about Comedy .............................................................................53 Chapter 3: Heidegger’s Neglect of Comedy, but a Heideggarian Interpretation of Comedy Nonetheless .............................................................................................................................57 3.1. The Forgetting of Comedy .........................................................................................57 3.2. Fallen Comedy ...........................................................................................................63 3.3. Great Art, Comedy, and the Subject/Object Divide ..................................................70 3.4. True Comedy .............................................................................................................81 3.5. A Heideggerian Interpretation of Aristophanes .........................................................86 Chapter 4: The Conclusion; the Use and Abuse of Comedy for Life—Notes for a Nietzschean Philosophy of Comedy .......................................................................................92 4.1. Introduction ................................................................................................................92 4.2. The Spirit of Gravity ..................................................................................................93 4.3. On Genealogy ............................................................................................................99 4.4. Nietzsche on Comedy and Laughter ........................................................................103 4.5. Overcoming the Ascetic Ideal ..................................................................................111 References ...................................................................................................................................118 i Abstract The Efficacy of Comedy: Focusing on the efficacy of comedy as a genre, utilizing Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Heidegger’s philosophy. It begins with a historical analysis of the efficacy of comedy in Ancient 4th and 5th century Athens focusing on Aristotle’s conceptions of comedy. It analyses what Aristotle wrote about comedy and attempts a reconstruction of what his book on comedy from the poetics may have said. It then examines the shift to aesthetics rather than the Philosophy of Art with a focus on Kant and the Critique of Judgment. Comedy here is used as an interpretive tool in order to highlight the shortcomings of Aesthetics. It then examines comedy and its potential for being a truly great art form and explicates a Heideggerian interpretation of comedy. This novel interpretation describes two types of comedy: True comedy and Fallen comedy. Finally, it provides a Nietzschean perspective, particularly as it pertains to the power of comedy and laughter and its ability to overcome the exclusive mono-perspective found in the ascetic ideal and its overestimation of the efficacy of truth in our contemporary context. ii Introduction: The Efficacy of Comedy Philosophy on comedy, humor, and laughter is sparse and fragmentary throughout the history of the canon. There is a lacuna of sorts until the twentieth century in the area of philosophy. The first monographs solely devoted to comedy and laughter are Henri Bergson’s Laughter and Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. The only notable exceptions are the alleged lost work by Aristotle on comedy that should belong in the Poetics mirroring his section on tragedy, and the Earl of Shaftsbury’s (Anthony Ashley Cooper’s) Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour from 1709, where the term “humor” first starts to mean something “funny” rather than the medical term for the humors of the body. The latter half of the twentieth century has seen a greater proliferation of books and articles dealing with the topics of comedy, laughter, and humor, and I attribute this to the prevalence of the now preeminent genre of comedy in our society. The primary arts of our culture (in the US) are television, film, and popular music. It has been said that if all poetry, sculpture, and painting stopped in this country, few would even notice, but if there were a halt in film, television, and streaming media, there would be an uproar. Our world (in the Heideggerian sense) or culture’s art has lost its sense of the tragic. Very rarely are tragic movies produced by major film studios, and still more rarely are these films major blockbusters. As it turns out, many movies have their endings changed to be more “upbeat” or “uplifting” or “even funny” if they do not “test well” with focus groups. Most of our films are comedies in the sense either that they are meant to be humorous or that they have a “happy 1 ending.”1 Rather than trying to recapture a sense of the tragic, I would like to examine this comedic phenomenon genealogically. I intend to craft a counterhistory of comedy that discloses the countenance of its efficacy while simultaneously addressing a major problem within the philosophy of art. Though comedy may be the US’s preeminent genre, it falls into an odd space when we consider it aesthetically. Aesthetics is what we currently refer to as the philosophy of art. This is problematic for many reasons. First, aesthetics as a field is really only a few hundred years old and is myopic in its view toward art. Second, and more importantly, it really does not adequately address or assess comedy, especially comedy considered as a concrete, theatrical art form and not just as joking or general humor. This is especially troubling given that comedy along with tragedy are two of the West’s oldest forms of “art,” if we can even call them that. The term art itself is not without its own genealogical problems. I plan to use comedy as an interpretive tool in dismantling the dualistic aesthetic framework and to show how it falls short of its transcendental and universalist aims. Even if aesthetic experience were to achieve its end, it would still ring hollow when compared to “art” in a context. Before I begin, I must tersely adumbrate the leading theories on the philosophy of humor and laughter. This work deals more with the topic of comedy than with either humor or laughter, but it is not feasible to talk about comedy or comedic acts without at least an initial understanding of what we have come to think of as the predominant theories of humor and 1 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967). Nietzsche claims at the end of section 5 of Birth of Tragedy that “the entire comedy of art is neither performed for our betterment or education nor are we the true authors of this art world. On the contrary, we may assume that we are merely images and artistic projections for the true author [the will?], and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works

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