Del sentit de l'humor com a sentit comú

Abstract

Taking as a reterence the observations made about the phenomenon of laughter by some oï the most important thinkers in the western tradition, this article attempts to distinguish between comedy in general and that which is commonly called a sense of humor. This faculty, according to Shaftesbury, must be considered to be a farm of common sense and is, thus, closer to thought than to emotion. To develop this line of thought, the article reviews the ideas of Octavio Paz, Milan Kundera and Luigi Pirandello about the modernity ot humor and the attributes which define it, and demonstrates the formal characteristics of comedy -what makes us laugh and why- starting from the theories otHutcheson, Kant, Schopenhauer and Bergson. All of these considerations lead to the condusion that, if laughter can be provoked by the simple perception o{ incongruity, a sense of humor, which can be either empathetic or hostile, always implies reflection about the meaning of the incongruity. Or, in terms of Bergson's criteria, about the lack of common sense which a human being demonstrates when acting as a mechanical object.