"The Odd One In - On Comedy" by Alenka Zupančič (2008)

No matter what you think about her basis in Lacanian psychoanalysis ("It doesn’t stop not being written. Since it cannot be written, it doesn’t stop not being written, it doesn’t stop, it persists as necessary in its very impossibility,") even if you're no neophyte comedy wonk, you come away with the impression that no one in the history of philosophy nor the history of comedy has ever thought about it all this intensely.* Four stars.

*"Human beings are composed neither of the biological and the symbolic, nor of the physical and the metaphysical—the image of composition is misleading. Human beings are, rather, so many points where the difference between the two elements, as well as the two elements themselves as defined by this difference, are generated, and where the relationship between the two dimensions thus generated is being constantly negotiated.

There is no 'pure life' or 'pure Symbolic' prior to this curious intersection. The generating point of the Symbolic is this paradoxical joint, and the Symbolic as a wholly independent, autonomous realm is something produced—it is produced at the periphery of the movement generated by the intersection, and retroactively affecting its own point of generation—its own 'birth,' so to speak. The nature of this intersection is such that we can precisely not see it as an intersection; we cannot put a finger on it and say: Voilà, it is here that 'nature' is becoming 'culture.' This passage can be noticed and established only from the latter point, that is to say, from where it has already taken place. In other words, the double circular movement described corresponds in fact to the movement along the surface of the Möbius strip: we start, say, at an extreme point of one side, and without ever passing to the other side, we end up at an extreme point of it. This brings us back to the point—or, more exactly, two points—made in Part I of this discussion of comedy. First, what the topology of the Möbius strip reveals is that the missing link that structures our reality is not a missing link between two neighbor elements, the connection between which would thus be interrupted—instead, its very missing is the linkage between two neighbor elements; it is what makes it possible for them to 'fit' into each other. Second, comedy forces this constitutive missing link to appear as something—not by trying to provide its own version of the (always fantasmatic) moment of the passage of one side into the other, but by producing a short circuit between two sides, and sustaining it ('playing with it') as a possible articulation of the impossible. It is here that comedy fully affirms itself as the genre of the copula that articulates together, in its specific way, the two heterogeneous dimensions of the same reality."

"Pleasure: A History" Edited by Lisa Shapiro (2018)

Was reading a philosophy book about pleasure in and of itself actually pleasant? No, in fact at times it was downright maddening. Nonetheless, did I want to read it? Yes. Would I say reading it was worthwhile? Actually, very much so. In a way, it was exactly what I was looking for. But would I recommend that people pick up and read a philosophy book for themselves? Not if you don't like being driven crazy. Adjoining to the above contradictions, does it make sense that I would highly rate a book that filled me with deeply unpleasant feelings, that I wouldn't recommend to others, and in fact would advise to actively avoid, that spends a tremendous amount of time logically explaining how in the end it's impossible to understand certain things? (Why do we seek pleasant things? <24 pages later> It is because they are pleasant.) No, probably not. Four stars.

"Jokes - Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters" by Ted Cohen (1999)

Well, it only gets interesting at the very end, when this University of Chicago philosophy professor defends offensive jokes; I'm not sure he does a good job of it though (basically saying that correcting the joke doesn't meaningfully solve any problems.) As for the rest of this short book, it frankly doesn't feel all that insightful, for instance, saying that jokes require some conditional knowledge/emotion from the receiver in order to work, or that Jewish jokes often play with absurd logic perhaps because Talmudic interpretation involves twisting logic games. There are a great deal of street jokes reprinted here, including a Polish joke I once heard Norm Macdonald tell, but I would argue that's not necessarily a good thing. I mean, I was promised philosophy. Two stars.

"Immortal Comedy - The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature, and Life" by Agnes Heller (2005)

It claims to be one of the few books to examine comedy from a philosophical perspective (even Aristotle, as far as we know, avoided it.) If you count literary criticism, that's certainly not true. What I'll say is it's one of the few books I've run into that tries to distinguish comedy as a high art form, analyzing plays, novels, jokes, paintings, and movies along the way; it seeks to identify comic works that achieve the sublime (as in sublimating innocuous laughter towards a higher, noteworthy aesthetic effect) which according to her definition would even exclude works like "The Simpsons" (memorable jokes, like fireworks, that always lead back to the status quo.) Whether or not that interests you, I suppose, is your business. But I will say her argument that our current comedy rarely does anything new, and in fact, steals liberally from past comedic innovations (see "Arrested Development's" similarities to commedia dell'arte, or even Charlie Kaufman's similarities to 20th-century existentialists like Kafka) is a rather damning one. That said, the main criticism I have of this extremely interesting, wonderfully accessible meditation on high comedy (tell an aspiring comedian that you consider comedy to be an art form and they'll consider you cuckoo, believe me) is, sure, that's all well and good, but is Samuel Beckett really all that much of a knee-slapper? Maybe not. In fact, Beckett sounds like he might be downright irritating. Yes, I may just be ridiculing something I'm too unsophisticated to understand, but it's not my fault I wasn't born into money, or into a culture that doesn't consider literature to be an impractical, time-wasting luxury.* Five stars.

*"All people are 'thrown' into a concrete social universe. The human genetic endowment is programmed for social life, but there is nothing in the genetic endowment which would encode a newborn for this or that particular, concrete social environment into which he or she is thrown. Philosophically speaking, there are two initial a priories in human life: a social a priori (the world into which each is thrown) and a genetic a priori (the inherited endowments of the thrown being herself). Since there is no initial connection between the two, and since only the experience of any single person can forge this connection, it is philosophically correct to speak of two a priories, given that they are prior to experience for all human newborns. To use a term coined by Hannah Arendt, this is the condition of human natality. In the process of socialization those two a priories must come together; they must dovetail in order for the individual person even to survive. But—and this is my hypothesis—the two a priories cannot be entirely dovetailed; there remains a tension between them. To use another kind of metaphor, an unbridgeable abyss remains between the two a priories. I call this existential tension and an existential abyss. According to the conception of laughing and crying presented here, both of these are reactions to the impossibility of a real jump over the abyss; laughing and crying are responses to the failure of any complete dovetailing between the social and the genetic a priori."