¡°A good many studies of humour¡±, Terry Eagleton observes, ¡°begin with the shamefaced acknowledgment that to analyse a joke is to kill it dead.¡± He robustly rejects this view: a joke is no more ruined by analysis than a poem. He nonetheless often seems strangely reluctant to examine specific pieces of wit very closely as he moves through theories of laughter and free-wheeling speculations on the relation of humour to history and to politics.

An account of a joke in which Bill Clinton and the Pope die on the same day, for example, is cited merely as an instance of blasphemy and so, in Freudian terms, a lifting of repression. Clinton is (rather meanly) consigned to hell and the Pope to heaven, but a bureaucratic error reverses their destinations. The next day, the error is corrected, and the two men converse briefly mid-journey, ¡°the Pope remarking on how eager he was to see the Virgin Mary, and Clinton informing him that he was just ten minutes too late¡±.

The play of wit here could be interpreted with reference to Mary Douglas¡¯ argument (in an essay cited elsewhere in the book) that a joke ¡°brings into relation disparate elements in such a way that one accepted pattern is challenged by another which in some way was hidden in the first¡±. (This view is strongly supported by a punning dialogue that Eagleton includes: ¡°¡®Would you like a bridal suite?¡¯ a young man asks his bride-to-be while planning their honeymoon, to which she replies, ¡®No thanks, I¡¯ll just hang on to your ears.¡¯¡±) In its implicit opposition between eternity and Clinton¡¯s casual ¡°ten minutes¡±, the Pope-meets-Clinton narrative also prompts thoughts of Coleridge¡¯s location of humour in ¡°the comparison of finite things with those which our imaginations cannot bound¡±. Either of these points of reference might have made the joke worth discussing further in the chapter on ¡°Incongruities¡± ¨C which is, however, lively and full of unexpected scholarly snippets; it treats the problematic elasticity of the incongruity theory of humour as an opportunity to range over diverse variants of it, culminating in William Hazlitt¡¯s ¡°unexpected loosening or relaxing of¡­ stress¡± at abrupt transitions that take the mind unawares.

The chapter on ¡°Scoffers and Mockers¡± has an odder focus: as Eagleton notes, Thomas Hobbes¡¯ view that we laugh to feel superior excludes playful or ¡°delightfully nonsensical¡± concepts of humour. In response, he comes close to Georges Bataille¡¯s view that, in laughing at the loss of ¡°sufficiency¡± on the part of a ¡°serious character¡±, we also lose our own sufficiency and seriousness, and feel a consequent relief. A joking anecdote, here, features a protagonist whose very haplessness invites sympathy: an obscure vicar receives a letter asking him to give a radio talk, and specifying the fee as five pounds, at which he writes back ¡°to say that he would be delighted to deliver such a talk, and that he was enclosing his five pounds¡±.

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Humour, then, is an enjoyable ramble, at its most engaging when drawn to the more anarchic aspects of laughter, citing Jacques Lacan¡¯s claim that the value of a joke lies in the ¡°possibility to play on the fundamental non-sense of all usages of sense¡±.

Chloe Chard is an independent scholar who is writing a book on laughter, travel and art.

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Humour
By Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press
192pp, ?16.99
ISBN 9780300243147
Published 9 April 2019