As the old joke goes, The Paris Review on humor is no laughing matter. Ninety-seven pages into its special issue, “Whither Mirth?,” Jeffrey Eugenides decides to posit a rib-tickler:
Humor is always generated by the leap from a premise to a logical but unseen conclusion. It works according to the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-thesis dialectic. For example, take the vaudeville joke (reprised by Buddy Glass): First comedian: “I just spent two weeks in bed with an acute hepatitis.” Second comedian: “You lucky stiff! Which one? They’re both cute, those Hepatitis girls.” Here the thesis is hepatitis, a disease. The antithesis is the Hepatitis girls, two people. The final thesis— the humor—comes with the recognition of the unseen connection between these two dissimilar items.
The thesis is sounder than the joke. For the pun to work, the first comedian has to say, “I just spent two weeks in bed with acute hepatitis”—not “an acute hepatitis.” But, somewhere between Jeffrey’s pen and the printed text, that indefinite article has been inserted and the entire humorological foundation of the joke has collapsed. Of course, you could hastily improvise a rescue plan and make the two sisters Anna Cute-Hepatitis and Dolores Cute-Hepatitis, but, in vaudeville at any rate, I think you’d find you’d been given the hook by now and replaced by Otto the Wonder Poodle.
Happily, the world of letters is far less demanding. Humor is an act of precise but lightly-worn compression; analysis of humor tends to woolly but
