| Chapter 1: | Uproarious Prologue |
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Available structural features (affordances) organize fields of imagery and myth partially in terms of their manifestation of container/content relations. Not all of these images have humorous potential, but in certain areas of expression, splitting an enclosure or opening enclosed contents can convey humorous value. Laughter is an embodied performance, splitting the face or head, conceived as container (cup, bowl, or melon). Concerning this phenomenon, consider Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, seen by some (Schiwy, Neue Aspekte des Strukturalismus) to foreshadow Lévi-Strauss. Plessner’s Laughing and Crying built upon his achievements in Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, where he developed the concept of “eccentric positionality”: the positional relation characteristic of the human modality of life. Carefully considering plant and animal modalities, examining relations of each life-form’s body to its boundaries (living bodies’ “positionality”), Plessner summarized various expressions of the human form in terms of unstable relations between having and being a body, something irresolvable as a phenomenological structure of human life experience. These unstable relations amount to decentered or eccentric form, placing the relation of humans to themselves outside of themselves. This formulation’s value was well demonstrated in Plessner’s more empirical work discussing laughing and crying as a coordinated pair of capabilities accompanying the human life-form.
For Plessner, when “We burst out laughing,” explosive breakup into laughter (unlike gradual breakdown in tears) is how the human life-form replies to “Unanswerable and nonthreatening situations” (Laughing and Crying, 67). “The lack of transition in laughter is readily apparent in expressions like ‘bursting out,’ ‘splitting,’ ‘exploding’ […]” at times when “[t]he occasion for laughter overtakes and overpowers us” (65). Breakdown in meaningful relations of the human world, for example in linguistic registers in puns and perceptually as aspectuality, provokes the body to take over, providing explosive performances of laughter. If one takes laughter seriously, one must conclude, following Plessner, these incidents of breakdown in meaningful relations of the human world are ubiquitous, considering how frequently people laugh in the course of their daily lives.