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(2014) Humor, laughter and human flourishing, Dordrecht, Springer.
This chapter focuses on that which I believe is missed or compromised when humor is not taken seriously and considered a genuine human capacity. I begin by showing that although laughter is likely to have evolved from play signals of primates, humor is a distinctively human phenomenon that involves the ability to enjoy cognitive shifts and appreciate ambiguities and incongruities. Next, I compare humor to other ways of knowing and understanding and show that it provides us with unique insights about human existence. I then illustrate the uniqueness of humor by focusing on the type of jokes that point to a truth about human existence. Here, I attempt to provide a provisional answer to the question: why do jokes that highlight some fundamental fact of our existence seem to be so appealing to us? The last part of this chapter explores the educational significance of the type of humor that is directed at making fun of human existence.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-00834-9_2
Full citation:
Gordon, M. (2014). Humor, truth, and human existence, in Humor, laughter and human flourishing, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 15-28.
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