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PARTISAN REVIEW
to describe. Whatever else the humorous might be, it is as elusive as it is
supremely fragile. Even Henri Bergson, surely one of comedy's most inci–
sive "explainers," recognized this built-in trap: capturing the essence of the
humorous, he sadly (wisely?) concluded, was akin to holding seafoam in
one's hands.
Small wonder that most people enjoy the work of a good comedian
(which is to say, they
laugh),
but then quickly dismiss the enterprise as
"mere humor." Tragedy, after all, demands of us high degrees of thought–
fulness, sensibility, sophistication, and perhaps most of all, seriousness. By
contrast, the comic presumably asks only that you "get it"-and if you
don't (because, say, the cultural context is unfamiliar), no lectures in social
history or comic theory are likely to change things. To paraphrase Rodney
Dangerfield, comedy gets no respect. On the slopes of Parnassus, it has
always occupied a spot on the lower elevations. At the same time, we rec–
ognize the sly wisdom packed into the bumper sticker proclaiming, "He
who laughs, lasts."
Enter Peter
L.
Berger, a sociologist of large reputation, but an amateur
(in the original Latin sense of "lover") with regard to the comic. Because
he casts a very wide net in terms of examples, some specialists will no
doubt take him to task for playing fast and loose with the scholarly niceties.
But Berger, to his credit, remains cheerfully undeterred, and in the process
spins out a book that makes clear sense of a complicated subject at the same
time that it allows comic anecdotes space to "breathe." In an age when far
too many scholarly studies make little effort to mask their joylessness,
Redeeming Laughter
is a refreshing exception. Berger obviously enjoyed
writing this book-indeed, there are times, especially in his footnotes,
when playfulness verges on distraction-but it is also obvious that he has
some very serious cards up his sleeve. If, as Berger argues, comedy is an
important dimension of the human experience, it requires an understanding
that goes well beyond analysis as usual. To this end, he begins by stating his
thesis as succinctly as possible:
Humor-that is, the capacity to perceive something as being
funny-is universal; there has been no human culture without it.
It can safely be regarded as a necessary component of humanity. At
the same time, what strikes people as funny and what they do in
order to provoke a humorous response differs enormously from
age to age, and from society to society. Put differently, humor is an
anthropological constant
and
is historically relative. Yet, beyond or
behind all the relativities, there is the
something
that humor is
believed to perceive. That is, precisely the phenomenon of the
comic (which, if you will, is the objective correlate of humor, the
