In his unfinished masterwork, Dead Souls, 19th Century Russian author and dramatist, Nikolai Gogol, wrote: “The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes...”
Across disciplines – from philosophy to psychoanalysis, from behavioral and evolutionary psychology to sociology – and over centuries, brilliant thinkers have struggled to explain the causes, meanings, and implications of comedy and laughter. When a failed joke can ruin a public figure’s career, when laughter can help a nation cope with tragedy, when the postscript “just kidding” becomes a thinly veiled justification for words of hatred, assumed superiority and power, malice, and prejudice, learning to think critically and constructively about this slippery eel we call comedy is paramount. Because laughter is so inherently subjective – because of the variable contexts through which laughter and laughers are constituted (socially, politically, racially, sexually, nationally, relationally, etc.) – and because of its seemingly endless ameliorative/destructive/unifying/alienating/etc. functions, to think and write critically about laughter is to build the muscles of inquiry, analysis, and argumentation on which your future academic writing will ultimately depend.
In this course we will read, analyze, and discuss a range of both textual and visual sources—from The Big Lebowski to the philosophical writings by thinkers like Plato, Hobbes, Kierkegaard, etc.—while practicing strategies of formulating convincing academic arguments, and we will conduct regular workshop exercises in which we will read each other’s written work and give constructive feedback. This course will be a collaborative effort: we will all engage in critical debate; we will all learn to build and strengthen our academic voices; we will all learn to fortify and substantiate our arguments, and to make those arguments relevant in our fields; we will all learn to write effectively, convincingly, and with strength; we will all learn to write not with pens, but with hatchets.