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Humor

The Nature of Laughing at Ourselves

Mordechai Gordon takes ideas about not taking ourselves too seriously seriously.

To date, philosophers have concentrated much more on trying to account for what makes us laugh at others than on why we laugh at ourselves. Indeed, attempts to explain the phenomenon of laughing at others have been around for a long time, at least since Plato.

Plato & Hobbes

Plato subscribed to what we refer to today as the Superiority theory of humor, which maintains that laughter is an expression of one’s feeling of superiority over others. He argued in his dialogue Philebus that “we laugh at what is ridiculous in our friends” (48-50), and that what makes people laughable is their ignorance concerning their virtues (e.g.

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