After a wonderful few days in Budapest, I just arrived in St Andrews to loll about at Arch{e’} and eventually attend the “Truth and Realism Conference”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~pmg2/provisional.htm. I was at Safeway this morning to stock up on soft drink and other essential supplies and I noticed that they stocked “TLS”:http://www.the-tls.co.uk/ at the supermarket. I was recently commissioned to write something for TLS so this was moderately exciting. The thought that I could be so mainstream that I’d be writing something for a supermarket tabloid!
This week’s edition featured a very good, if scathing, review by Tim Crane of F. H. Buckley’s _The Morality of Laughter_. Sadly it isn’t online so I can’t link to it, but Tim does a remarkable job of taking apart the book’s main theses in a short space. Of course it’s impossibly hard to write decent philosophical prose about comedy (Ted Cohen’s “widely-praised book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226112306/ref%3Dnosim/caoineorg-20/002-7058737-1784850 perhaps being the only exception) so maybe Buckley shouldn’t be blamed too much. Or perhaps he (I think it’s he) should be blamed for the choice of topic.
If I was to write on comedy one of the problems I’d find is that I really can’t come up with anything approaching a _joke_. That isn’t to say I never generate anything funny – I hope there’s at least one or two things on this blog over the years that have been at least moderately amusing – but never with the structure of a joke. And witty observations in the context of larger conversations make not ideal examples for a philosophical study. But that’s hardly the only problem. There’s also the fact that the subject is too hard for my poor skills, as this story illustrates.
A few years ago I was watching a cricket game in which Glenn McGrath, as usual, was fielding on the boundary. Now McGrath, for the non-cricket watchers in the audience, is a tall gangly guy from outback New South Wales who does precisely two things well on the cricket field: bowl the ball and throw the ball. Indeed his bowling and throwing are as good as anyone to ever play the game. But things that involve more, or different, kinds of coordination are usually impossible for someone with his frame and ability. Usually, but not on this day. A ball was lofted into the outfield quite a way from where McGrath was fielding, and he took off in a dead sprint around the boundary, getting close enough that he could dive for the ball as it fell to the ground, and at full extension took a spectacular one-handed catch. When the camera panned back to his teammates around the pitch, who would usually be applauding such fine fielding, they were all having uncontrollable fits of laughter. As was entirely appropriate; it really was one of the _funniest_ things one could hope to see on a sporting field. Why is that? Well in part it’s because even at his finest fielding moment McGrath was still more than a little awkward-looking. And in part it’s because it was so unexpected that he would do something so spectacular. But plenty of slightly awkward, rather unexpected things are not funny at all, or are at best mildly amusing. Why was this different? I really don’t know, and I’m certainly not going to attempt writing on humour until that’s the kind of question I can answer.