Though she gives a brilliant interview to Ashley Hoffman of Time (8/25/2017), Tig Notaro only briefly mentions something that touches on my theme here: the idea of comedy as a release. It’s just a short blurb, but the first question of the interview is:
How do you see the relationship between personal tragedy and humor?
They go hand and hand. It’s hard for me to imagine digesting everything without a comedic release. That’s what I use to cope. It’s crucial for my peace of mind.
So here again we see the popular notion that people are pressure cookers of pain and grief and angst, and it’s up to humor to let off some steam before we explode in a cloud of gunfire. Yes, I’m trying to be more funny on here.
I only bring this up, because the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes,
Having sketched several versions of the Relief Theory, we can note that today almost no scholar in philosophy or psychology explains laughter or humor as a process of releasing pent-up nervous energy…. [F]ew contemporary scholars defend the claims of Spencer and Freud that the energy expended in laughter is the energy of feeling emotions, the energy of repressing emotions, or the energy of thinking, which have built up and require venting.
Despite the fact that scholar’s don’t use it, I follow Michel Foucault in arguing that if the idea is still part of the popular discourse formation of humor, still part of the way people understand humor’s effect on their lives, then it’s worth discussing in more detail. And here is more evidence that it’s still around.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
