So lately I’ve been reading Robert Pippin’s book, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, which is an amazingly well-written reinterpretation of Hegel’s work, placing it in the context of the general Idealist problematic originating with Kant, viz. the “Transcendental Deduction”: essentially speaking, how can we genuinely ground our knowledge of the world? According to Pippin, what Hegel deems most important in Kant is the “transcendental unity of apperception.” What this boils down to is that when I do something, say, writing this blog post, I don’t simply write it, but I take myself to be writing it, or, to formulate it in propositional terms, the difference between asserting that S is P and taking myself to be asserting that S is P. This “taking myself to be asserting” is the apperceptive formula and, according to Kant and Hegel, the dimension of self-consciousness.

So how does humor come to play a role? Recently I was talking with some friends and the topic of conversation turned to one professor here at the university who has a reputation on campus for having a grandiose and flamboyant persona (it’s impossible to describe unless you were to meet him in person, really). When I took one of his courses during my sophomore year, for example, it was commonplace for my friends and I to work on our impersonations of him, delivering them to one another to see who could do the best rendition. Anyhow, it turns out that our on-campus Onion-esque magazine, the Every Three Weekly, recently published an article titled, “University celebrates one-millionth Ralph Williams impersonation.”

The reason why the joke is funny is because, at a structural level, it informs you about something that you hadn’t realized before: it takes into cognition an action performed that hadn’t been self-consciously reflected upon. Meaning, when I, as a single individual, perform this action (an imitation, in this example) sans self-reflection, I immediately think of it as something I’ve done spontaneously, on my own free will. Yet, what the joke makes clear is that the action itself is a product of a certain structure and therefore not “spontaneous,” in the sense of autonomous, at all. There is therefore a contradiction between consciousness and self-consciousness, between (individual) action and joke, that distinguishes the way in which I can either be unconsciously determined by the symbolic order or take into account, by means of apperception, the way in which the actions that I take to be considered spontaneous/autonomous are, at least to some degree, not.

I would say too that, at a certain abstract level, this apperceptive dimension is inherent to most jokes. The elementary gesture is purely transcendental in the sense that it identifies individual actions not as peculiar and individual, but instead as alienating products of social phenomena and our laughter is produced by an anxiety, one that is provoked by both a sense of prior heteronomy (that I performed my individual action as spontaneous) and a new-found sense of autonomy (the joke qua outside voice serves as the previously-barred apperceptive reflexivity of self-consciousness). Consequently, laughter, genuine laughter, is the product, objet petit a, of the very transition from Symbolic determination to the Real, the fact that, through the apperceptive dimension of my actions, I become aware of my freedom.