COMEDY

INTRODUCTION 11‘absence’, a sudden release of intellectual tension, and then all atonce the joke is there—as a rule ready clothed in words.(Freud [1905], 2001:167, original emphasis)Making jokes is an almost involuntary act; they come across the joker inan instant, fully formed and with no explanation as to how they weremade. In Freud’s analysis, joking is symptomatic of the division in thepsyche that characterizes human beings. Once again, the comic acts as aparallel conversation, tracking reason and occasionally interrupting it.So what does this strange ability simultaneously to recognize thesocial order and comically subvert it amount to? Existential philosopherHelmuth Plessner cites the perception of the comic as evidence thathuman beings are intrinsically ‘eccentric’, as they are the only animalswith the capacity to reflect on their thoughts and experiences. Plessnerargues that our experience of the world is a result of informationmediated through the purposeful management of our speech, thoughts,and control of our limbs, all of which, organized around a coherentsense of self, leads us to believe in our mastery of the immediateenvironment. The world outside, however, is unconcerned with theindividual ego, and treats the human body as yet more matter. Thus weare at once convinced of our control of the environment, butsimultaneously aware that we are subject to disinterested nature:Just as the world and my own body are revealed to me, and can becontrolled by me, only insofar as they appear in relation to me asa central ‘I’, so, on the other hand, they retain their ascendancyover their subjection in this perspective as an order indifferent tome and including me in a nexus of mutual neighbourhoods.(Plessner, 1970:36)The subject, then, comes to reflect upon itself as both ego and matter,and is divided in this knowledge. As Simon Critchley puts it, ‘thehuman being has a reflective attitude towards its experiences andtowards itself, living ‘beyond the limits set for them by nature by takingup a distance from their immediate experience’ (Critchley, 2002:28).The title of Plessner’s work is Laughing and Crying, because theseeffects, both largely involuntary, involve moments when the bodilyintrudes into the sense of self and overruns it, disturbing the consciousmind. Human eccentricity is the product, therefore, of discontinuitybetween the world in our head and the world outside. ‘In this respect,’says Plessner, ‘man is inferior to the animal since the animal does not