> Maybe. But it seems to me that laughter is more liberating than the quoted passage implies.
I think so too. But I think the superiority theory fits all the "fuck Aristotle and Plato" comments (which can also be read as failed attempts at humor), that we've been getting here lately.
Here's some more from the Cabinet essay:
....Yet no figure in the philosophical tradition has produced a sustained account of humor and laughter that bears comparison with Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Freud’s interest in the problem of humor was not primarily philosophical. Rather, he was specifically attracted to jokes—a subgenre of the humorous—because of their many likenesses to dreams. (When Wilhelm Fleiss was reading the proofs of The Interpretation of Dreams in the fall of 1899, he complained to Freud that the dreams seem to contain an awful lot of jokes.) In both jokes and dreams, Freud observed, meanings are condensed and displaced; things are represented indirectly or by their opposites; fallacious reasoning trumps logic. Jokes, like dreams, arise involuntarily (and, also like dreams, tend to be swiftly forgotten). From these similarities, Freud inferred that jokes and dreams share a common origin in the unconscious and are both essentially means of outwitting the inner “censor.” Yet there is a critical difference, he added. Jokes are meant to be understood; indeed, this is crucial to their success. Dreams, by contrast, remain unintelligible even to the dreamer, and are therefore totally uninteresting to other people. In a sense, a dream is a failed joke.
....Jokes are products of human ingenuity that, at their driest and most refined, fall within the domain of art.