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Mississippi. We laugh at Huck's studied nalVete at the same time we realize, in
Twain's words, that his protagonist possesses a "sound heart and a deformed
conscience." If America is often regarded as a "dream," a country built on the
essential differences between the Old [bad] World and the New, the humor
such an arithmetic can produce forces us to laugh at our vaunted illusions, and
sometimes to act to shorten the distance, close the gap. To be sure, the litmus
test of any humor is whether or not it is funny, whether or not it entertains.
Twain, who kept a close eye on the gate, knew this; but he also understood
that even the best joke was not likely to survive its cultural moment-which
is why he insisted that "humor should not professedly preach and it should not
professedly teach, but it must do both
if
it would live forever." And being
Twain, he followed his remark with an ellipsis, and then the kicker: "By for–
ever, I mean thirty years." Twain, of course, has lasted much longer than that,
and part of the reason is the moral sentiment just underneath his highjinks.
Humor, in a word, is
serious-if,
by "serious;' one means having an inti–
mate connection to the most important rhythms and matters of human life.
That's, of course, where the rub comes in, for most serious philosophers have
declined to think seriously about the cornic (in this regard, Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche are serious exceptions). They regard the cornic as,
well,jivolous,
something not worth their sustained attention. In roughly the same way, most
people do not imagine that one can, in Berger's words, "simultaneously pray
and joke, declare one's love and joke, contemplate mortality and joke":
Conventionally, then, the comic appears to be banned from all
truly serious occasions. This social fact has led many to the view
that the comic is a superficial or marginal aspect of human life, in
which case it would be perfectly understandable that serious
thinkers have not paid attention to it. The present book is ground–
ed in the conviction that such a view is very much mistaken.
By contrast, what Berger offers up is nothing more or less than
transcen–
dence,
a term that fashionable theorists now regard as a fighting word. At
one level, Berger argues, "the cornic transcends the reality of ordinary,
everyday existence." For the short duration of a joke the assumptions and
rules of ordinary life are suspended. To appropriate some distinctions made
famous by the English Romantics, a joke allows us to see the like in the
unlike, the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange. This sense
of "transcendence" carries no particular religious freighting, but Berger's
second meaning of the term most assuredly does:
