When the unfaithful artist heard his wife coming up the stairs, he said to his lover, “Quick! Take off your clothes!”
What is important for comedy, thus, is not so much subject matter, but a manner of presentation. What the comic author writes about is not so important as how the material is presented. Kaufman claims that “the same material can be made into a tragedy and into a comedy”
A comedy is not just a funny story. It is a demonstration of how the world would appear if we could approach everything with a sense of humor.
— Laughing at Nothing
A comedy is not just a funny story. It is a demonstration of how the world would appear if we could approach everything with a sense of humor.
— Laughing at Nothing
The feeling of emotion can be overwhelming and it may at times threaten to destroy us unless we are able to gain some sort of distance from it and ourselves. The humorous attitude allows for this sort of distance. While the realities and incongruities of the world may never change, humor allows us the opportunity to shift our way of viewing them, and in so doing to transform all of our experiences, be they good or evil, into constructive opportunities for affirmative enjoyment.
— Laughing at Nothing
— Laughing at Nothing
It is not simply that people nowadays care about appearances more than before, it is that beyond appearances there is nothing. They are nothing more than the sum of their masks: remove the mask and you'll see another one, like layers of onion that you keep peeling until you reach the core. Then you'll be caught by surprise, because the core is not even rotten, it's empty. Perfect bodies and empty spirits.
Freud and Humor:
Freud thinks of the humorous attitude as a kind of defensive mechanism, and in fact as “the highest of the defensive processes.” In displacing the psychic energy naturally summoned for one affect into the service of another, humor allows us to guard against depression and despair in the face of the necessities of nature. Humor empowers us to resist what reality tells us it is hopeless to resist against.
In the humorist, Freud claims that we find an Ego that forsakes the “reality principle” in favor of the “pleasure principle,” and in so doing approximates the processes involved in psychopathology. Humor understands reality, but refuses to be constrained by it. Instead, it strives for pleasure, even in the face of overwhelming circumstances. In refusing to suffer in the face of adversity and demanding pleasure from the world, humor rebels against the natural order of things, liberating one from the chains of nature. In these ways, Freud considers humor a form of neurosis.
— Laughing at Nothing
Freud thinks of the humorous attitude as a kind of defensive mechanism, and in fact as “the highest of the defensive processes.” In displacing the psychic energy naturally summoned for one affect into the service of another, humor allows us to guard against depression and despair in the face of the necessities of nature. Humor empowers us to resist what reality tells us it is hopeless to resist against.
In the humorist, Freud claims that we find an Ego that forsakes the “reality principle” in favor of the “pleasure principle,” and in so doing approximates the processes involved in psychopathology. Humor understands reality, but refuses to be constrained by it. Instead, it strives for pleasure, even in the face of overwhelming circumstances. In refusing to suffer in the face of adversity and demanding pleasure from the world, humor rebels against the natural order of things, liberating one from the chains of nature. In these ways, Freud considers humor a form of neurosis.
— Laughing at Nothing