The speculative ethics of modern comedic work: Mark Twain, Italo Svevo, Charlie Chaplin and Lenny Bruce

This study conjectures a mode of comedy that, by means of exposing the immoral dimension of laughter, advances ethical self-encounter. Historically, scholarship has understood laughter as the sign of the subject's superiority over the object of laughter and consequently as a collective tool to mildly punish those who do not adapt to the demands of society. This understanding, productive as it may be, is grounded in a world-view that foregrounds violence, conspiracy and conformism---a world-view that in itself deserves to be ridiculed and thus corrected. This dissertation examines the works of Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin, Italo Svevo and Lenny Bruce---comedians and comic writers who evoked an ethical laughter that would encourage their audience to transcend the need to feel superior. Furthermore, this study means to correct the misreading that comes from Emmanuel Levinas's assumption that ethics cannot be introduced without traumatizing the subject. As a medium, comedy is uniquely suited to introducing ethical obligations without the intimidation that occurs when these obligations are promulgated through religion or philosophy. My intention here is twofold: to show how Levinas's theory may benefit from what I call "the speculative ethics of modern comedy" and to demonstrate how Levinas's work can answer a basic problem of the comedian. Lenny Bruce once claimed that comedians with a social goal, including himself, were hypocrites because "[t]he purity they do profess a need for, they just feed upon." In other words, comedians sustain themselves economically and socially from the very evils they supposedly resist. Levinas's answer to Bruce would be that if there were only two people in the world then comedy would have been unethical: the I would have infinite responsibility for the other and would have worked to correct injustices rather than make them into jokes. Once there are more than two, however, the infinite responsibility of the I for the other is limited by his responsibility for the third person. This limitation on responsibility is what necessitates the creation of the "said" ("le dit")---law, language, philosophy and comedy.