Pragmatism, Comedy, and Cognition

Where Gaskill and Zhang focus respectively on the ontological and epistemological factors involved in the creation of separate realities, Jane F. Thrailkill will look at aesthetic strategies capable of disrupting and... [ view full abstract ]

Where Gaskill and Zhang focus respectively on the ontological and epistemological factors involved in the creation of separate realities, Jane F. Thrailkill will look at aesthetic strategies capable of disrupting and reorganizing the way such boundaries are drawn, especially humor. Pragmatism and comedy both act like calisthenics for the philosophically minded. James famously wrote that pragmatism (personified as “she”) “‘unstiffens’ our theories . . . Her manners are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature.” And Henri Bergson, describing what he terms the “comic spirit,” notes that it is precisely the tendency of habit-prone humans to lapse into routine, inflexibility, and dogmatism that provokes mirth and sometimes outright hilarity: “the laughable element” in human experience arises from “a certain MECHANICAL INESLASTICITY, just where one would expend to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being.” Stephen Colbert, whose double-edged comedy makes fun of conservatives and how liberals perceive them, is exemplary in his recognizably pragmatist attempt to enlist his viewers’ curiosity, which in James’s phrase marks “the impulse toward better cognition.” Moving between late-nineteenth-century philosophy and contemporary cognitive science, Thrailkill will argue that Bergson’s Laughter (1907) and James’s Pragmatism (1907) help to light up the philosophical work of comedy in our current, not-funny political moment. Moreover, her paper will show how thinking with James and Bergson offers an alternative to more science-based approaches within cognitive literary studies.