ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Why do we laugh? Thomas Hobbes thought he knew the answer, as he did to most questions. Ridicule, to Hobbes, was a species of contempt. To laugh at something was to deride it. To be laughed at was to be slapped round the chops, an experience both painful and demeaning. Most importantly, ridicule always had a victim. Harmless mirth did not exist. This rather limited sense of ridicule proved shockingly resilient. Seventy-five years after Hobbes died, Samuel Johnson defined it in terms that would have been deeply familiar to the old philosopher: 'Wit of that species which provokes laughter, and is designed to bring the subject of it into contempt; derision; mockery; sport; satire; sarcasm.'

But there is another way of thinking about ridicule. In the early years of the 18th century a select group of philosophers began to conceive of laughter as something that might police the boundaries of sociable conduct. The chief exponent and theorist of this new school of thought was Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. Daunted by the boisterous reality of London's taverns and coffee houses, Shaftesbury obsessed over the impoverished condition of everyday social interaction. He saw the refinement of laughter as an important weapon in his crusade to improve English manners, replacing the embittered grunts and guffaws of the mob with cultivated chuckles. Certain immoral, unsociable and unnatural behaviours were intrinsically ridiculous and worthy of scorn, he thought. If disdainful Hobbesian laughter strained the bonds of community and fellow feeling, then this new Shaftesburian banter could bond virtuous citizens in shared contempt for the corrupt and profane. Laughing at vice would become a means of signalling virtue. To snigger at a righteous action was, by contrast, the surest route to exposing one's own moral deficiency. 

In Uncivil Mirth, Ross Carroll charts the tension between these two ways of thinking about ridicule. 

Tweet   @brothersjudd