Overcoming death with humor and laughter

Abstract

I observe in this text that rhetorical irony, in its intention to criticize or reinforce ideologies — through the juxtaposition of opposites or by saying something without explicitly stating it — later evolves into what Jankélévitch calls humoresque irony or second-degree irony, stemming from the awareness that the absolute is both realized and destroyed in a fleeting moment, in a balance between comedy and tragedy. By assuming the status of an evanescent language code and showing the impossibility of attaining the intended “truth” this irony often provokes laughter, which relates to what is most characteristic of human beings. That is to say: the tragic nature of life, which inevitably ends in (un)predictable death. It also ties in with the ability to distance oneself: the pleasure of thought, the taste of deception and the possibility of temporarily subverting, through play, the condemnation to death and everything it represents. Based on these reflections and others from various scholars who have studied humor and laughter (such as Freud, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Hobbes, Baudelaire, Bataille, Lacan, Jacques Alain-Miller and Abrão Slavutzky), I analyse fictional texts by Portuguese authors such as Lídia Jorge, Augusto Abelaira, valter hugo mãe and António Lobo Antunes, and Angolan authors such as João Melo and Manuel Rui. I conclude, with Maurice Blanchot, that laughter is related to the greatest desire of human beings — to die content, given the discontent of life.