From:
        Edward Gamarra <[log in to unmask]>

3:50 AM


I am currently working on a dissertation on comedy and have found that almost
every book or article I read on the subject begins with some caveat about the
difficulty of writing about humor.  This is true of both the psychological
texts and the film scholarship I examine.  As for Freud, he revisited the topic
in a 1927 article entitled "Humour." (SE 21, p. 160-166)  In it, he tries to
realign his observations in Jokes and Their.... to his newer structural model
of the mind.  It's a short article but very provocative in light of discussions
of Life is Beautiful in that he argues that the supergo is a parent that tells
the ego/child that life is just a game and one needs to learn the rules in
order to survive.  As for people who don't laugh (who have been labeled
"agelasts"), I have an article under review for the JPCS (Journal for the
Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society) on why Americans think Germans aren't
funny.  There's not much out there that I have found on agelasts that goes
beyond studies of either brain/neurological damage or depression.

Feel free to contact me personally for more info.

Eddie Gamarra
Psychoanalytic Studies Program
Emory University


Norman Holland wrote:

> From:
>         [log in to unmask]
>
> Sun 11:52 PM
>
> I asked Norm some questions off list that he suggested I post to the list,
> and I'm adding a couple more.
>
> 1) I find humor very difficult to write about, and I'm wondering if this
> issue has ever been discussed.
>
> 2) The worst and most boring writing about humor that I've seen is in the
> annotation to the Temple Classics translation of Dante's Commedia. The
> annotators set out to explain that Dante has made some kind of pun in the
> original Italian. By the time they get through explaining all the different
> nuances of what some Italian word or other can mean, one is exhausted, and
> thinking "why is that supposed to be funny?" Can anyone suggest any examples
> of _good_ expository writing about humor?
>
> 3) I like Freud's _Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious_, but
> disagreed with him about one thing. He seems to think that humor pleases us
> because it involves violation of psychosexual taboos. I thought it involved
> violation of language taboos, or unspoken rules about how language ought to
> be used.  But this was a very valuable book for laying out a way of thinking
> about humor. Am I correct in the impression that he never went back to the
> subject, and that the book didn't garner much attention?
>
> 4) Have any studies ever been made of people who seem to have no sense of
> humor?
>
> pat sloane