A Pessimist’s Theory of Humor

Schopenhauer on what’s funny — and why . . .

Cynthia Giles
Schopenhauer & Friends
4 min readApr 25, 2024

--

Google mash-up of Chantix “Slow Turkey” images

For me, personally, 2019 was a banner year for improbable humor. I ran across the room to see Chantix “slow turkey” commercials, every time they came on . . .

And I wasn’t alone. Drop by YouTube even now and type in “Chantix turkey.” Then be sure and look at the many comments: “hilarious,” “charming,” “calming,” “clever,” etc.

What made these comedic vignettes work so well? Incongruity.

We know that turkeys don’t go camping, mow the lawn, paddle-board, drive cars, watch television, make coffee, work jigsaw puzzles, or do any of the other things Slow Turkey does. But amazing animation and extraordinary attention to detail made those scenes seem perfectly believable.

And the more unlikely the activity, the more effective the comedy.

After Slow Turkey waddled off into the sunset, his place was taken by the Geico Gecko, who interacts seamlessly with the oversized human world — hanging out in bars, baking biscuits (aka cookies), getting stuck on a radio-controlled toy boat, and holding a yard sale.

He even has his own channel.

Those are just two examples of a reliable advertising strategy: incongruity is not only funny but memorable. And a pinch of absurdity increases the effectiveness.

Of late, advertisers seem to be adding a somewhat creepy vibe, but that’s another story. The point for now is that Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory of humor has become the prevailing view of why things seem funny.

Two other explanations of humor were dominant for a long time, from the classical era to the 17th century. One theory attributed laughter or amusement to a feeling of superiority, the other to a release of pent-up nervous energy. And both may seem true enough in relation to certain kinds of humor.

But Schopenhauer’s incongruity theory connects the most closely with our contemporary tastes.

If you consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the topic of humor, you’ll read this:

A version of the Incongruity Theory that gave it more philosophical significance than Kant’s version is that of Arthur Schopenhauer (1818/1844 [1907]). While Kant located the lack of fit in humor between our expectations and our experience, Schopenhauer locates it between our sense perceptions of things and our abstract rational knowledge of those same things.

We perceive unique individual things with many properties. But when we group our sense perceptions under abstract concepts, we focus on just one or a few properties of any individual thing. Thus we lump quite different things under one concept and one word. Think, for example, of a Chihuahua and a St. Bernard categorized under dog.

For Schopenhauer, humor arises when we suddenly notice the incongruity between a concept and a perception that are supposed to be of the same thing.

Schopenhauer was notoriously pessimistic, of course, and something of a curmudgeon — famous for having pushed his landlady down the stairs when she persisted in disturbing his studies. (They were in a contentious lawsuit over the incident for several years, and Schopenhauer eventually lost.)

But the grumpy philosopher also had an acerbic wit.

You can glimpse his snarky sense of humor in an essay that’s now known by the title “The Art of Being Right.” It was originally part of a miscellaneous collection, Parerga and Paralipomena (Greek for “Appendices” and “Omissions"), but when Schopenhauer later revised the volume, he allowed as how:

such a detailed and minute consideration of the crooked ways and tricks that are used by common human nature to cover up its shortcomings is no longer suited to my temperament, and so I lay it aside.

I’m inclined to think that was itself meant sarcastically — but for whatever reason, Schopenhauer’s 38 strategies for winning an argument were left out of the revised collection, and did not appear again during his lifetime. They resurfaced posthumously in a longish essay titled “The Art of Controversy,” and were subsequently put together in their own volume — reprinted many times since, in several translations.

You can read “The Art of Controversy” online, courtesy of Project Guttenberg. And on a quick scan, it will resemble any lavishly rhetorical treatise, filled with lofty arguments. But for the sake of efficiency, you can go right to the section headed “Stratagems,” where Schopenhauer paints a sly picture of the way humans use language and style to manipulate their opponents and serve their own ends.

Two of my personal favorites are “Meet [your opponent] with a counter-argument as bad as his” and “Put his thesis into some odious category.” I’m also fond of:

This, which is an impudent trick, is played as follows: When your opponent has answered several of your questions without the answers turning out favourable to the conclusion at which you are aiming, advance the desired conclusion, — although it does not in the least follow, — as though it had been proved, and proclaim it in a tone of triumph. If your opponent is shy or stupid, and you yourself possess a great deal of impudence and a good voice, the trick may easily succeed.

I can’t help thinking of certain moments that have occurred in political debates, where one person makes an outrageous assertion so confidently that their opponent is left in disarray. And while I can’t imagine certain public figures reading Schopenhauer, they might certainly have an intuitive grasp of those “crooked ways and tricks” he set out to satirize.

Schopenhauer explained his ideas about incongruity in the essay “A Theory of the Ludicrous,” which was added to a later version of The World as Will and Representation. But you needn’t master his somewhat complicated theory of humor to recognize that the father of modern pessimism was sometimes a funny guy.

Or to appreciate his rueful observation that “a sense of humor is the only divine quality of man.”

If you’d like a suitably humorous overview of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, I’ve written this handy Schopenhauer Cheat Sheet.

(And be sure to visit Corey Mohler’s Existential Comics!)

--

--

Cynthia Giles
Schopenhauer & Friends

Writer at large, Ph.D. in humanities. Persistently curious! Publishes "The Misfit Writer" on Substack. Launching Complexity Press, Autumn 2024.