• F. H. Buckley: The Morality of Laughter; University of Michigan Press; 2003; 240 pp.; $29.95.

“Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor,” Aristotle wrote, “for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.” F.H. Buckley expands upon that idea most welcomely. His book The Morality of Laughter reads like an oasis in the arid desert of humorless American discourse, watered by examples culled from the literature of days gone by and shaded by the fronds of philosophy.

We live in an era that has lost its sense of humor, “where nonsensical theories that could not survive the test of ridicule are now taken seriously,” writes Buckley, a professor of law at George Mason University School of Law. “Before adopting a fashionable idea, we ought first to enquire whether it twigs our sense of humor.” This being the case, “if laughter identifies nonsense, it warrants serious (well, not so serious) examination” — which Buckley provides in two theses.

The first, which he calls his Positive Thesis, argues that laughter signals the jester’s personal superiority over the butt. The second, his Normative Thesis, argues that this signal communicates that the jester is correct (not in all cases, of course). In short, Buckley proposes that “our laughter contains valuable information about how to live.”

Buckley examines a taxonomy of what he calls the “comic virtues” — the social virtues of integrity, moderation, fortitude, and temperance, and the charismatic virtues of grace, taste, and learning — and how laughter works to uphold them by showing the risibility of their corresponding vices. A comic vice, according to Buckley, is an insufficiency or excess of the virtue. For example, an insufficiency of integrity (“the queen of comic virtues”) is hypocrisy, which merits laughter at its fiercest. On the opposite end is “[m]isanthropy, the excessive honesty of the antihypocrite,” which is “almost the satirist’s occupational hazard.”

In Buckley’s analysis, the butt, the object of the wit’s mockery, becomes so upon his silly adherence to a circumscribed, mechanical way of life. Inasmuch as the butt (and observers) finds laughter unbearable and something expressly to avoid, laughter upholds the virtue by promoting it as the better way.

Buckley applies this analysis beyond individual human foibles. Law, art, architectures, even society may be governed by comic vices and sorely in need of the reforming spirit of laughter. Scholarship also descends into the ridiculous. “Laughter is little heard in the academy today,” Buckley writes, “and the turn to power and to politics explains why this is so. The English scholar who has lost interest in literature and who cares only for politics has exchanged the joy of beauty for the power to chastise those who do not share his political views, and his Faustian Bargain merits our laughter.”

As an example, Buckley relates that most rich episode, physicist Alan Sokal’s hoax upon the academic journal Social Text, in which luminaries of the risible academic theory of deconstructionism published an article gussied up with the appropriate buncombe and scare quotes to the effect that “physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.”

Laughter carries a message of reform to the butt, but its message, Buckley argues, can be blunted; an individual (or group) may foster resistance to laughter through several means. By such resistance, for example, a scholar fails to see the absurdity in thinking gravity works only through biases built into human language, an artist misses the unintended comedy of serious art constructed of toilet fixtures, an economist seriously argues the merits of a marketplace for babies three centuries after Swift penned the archetype of satire, and judges fail to laugh out of court the case of an FBI agent who embezzled two grand since his gambling habit was a federally protected “handicap.”

What’s at stake, according to Buckley? The good life. The ability to seek and to find beauty in art, to experience joy, to engage in a vibrant community.

The Morality of Laughter is a wonderful book, that rare gem that explains with verve why people do something (laugh) that is so intuitive we find it difficult to give reasons for it. In arguing for the morality of laughter, Buckley has provided an apology for nothing less than a life that seeks the transcendent.