The Ontic-Epistemic Theory of the Comic developed in this new book might be summarized as follows: normal
human cognition is subjective and anthropomorphic, which is to say people
are all but incapable of seeing external reality without re-interpreting it according
to their values, beliefs and judgments. We see the world, not through ‘rose coloured
glasses,’ but through multi-coloured and ever-changing lenses of
which we are almost always unaware – and which modify and even distort
our perceptions in various ways according to what our culture teaches us to
see in any given situation. So, not only is the selection of facts we perceive
in external states of affairs very limited — by various forms of filtering,
selections and simplifications — but we also add a great deal of cultural
baggage to our perceptions in order to give everything in life a social
significance, and a human orientation.
Perception is very nearly always directed and shaped by social
considerations, yet it would be impossible even to believe in cultural values,
or to live in a society based upon them, if it were obvious to everyone that
such socio-cultural institutions were merely arbitrary constructs first dreamt
up and later passed down and acculturated into each new generation, without
really being there at all. Normal human social cognition thus also serves, as
one of its most fundamental and crucial functions, to erase the distinction
between the different types of entity that we collectively consider ‘true’ or
‘real.’ The physical object must never appear more credible than, or even
distinct from, the mental one. A man’s social status must not seem any less
real than his body, and when we mentally associate concepts of status with
an actual person we see, for instance, in a policeman’s blue uniform, we must
not view this as a disguise, because the social state of being a true officer of
the law, a mere mental object, must be inseparable, and indistinguishable,
from the individual policeman himself, a real biological organism.
The comic then, that which causes laughter, according to Marteinson's
theory, is the perception of an ‘unravelling of the seams’ between external
facts, intuitive notions and cultural concepts, all of which are normally levelled
and rendered equivalent in anthropomorphic perception. Social being and material fact have different
criteria for truth and falsehood, and this is what is revealed by the comic. Laughter, then, is an
instinctive reaction to an epistemological checkmate, in particular an event which
shatters and fragments perceptions into the different ontic classes of objects
that normally comprise them. When this occurs, social reality as we know it
momentarily ceases to have the emotional and epistemological value of being real, and the
physical world in its cultural poverty is all that is left standing in perception. The cultural intensions
the laughing subject had equated with his or her intuitive notions of the concrete state of affairs
pass from a high degree of acceptance to a perception of falsehood. Laughter in fact serves to restore normal
socio-cognitive perception and to facilitate the forgetting of the comic stimulus. Very frequently, these stimuli involve concepts
of social identity, and other aspects of the perception of social roles. For this reason, this book considers laughter from the point of view of the ontology of social being.
To place an order for On the Problem
of the Comic, please contact
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