Humor and Existentialism

[cannonss]

I've recently started to consider humor as a transformative mode of thinking, rather than simply a form of escapism. Comedic thought allows you to restructure ideas and beliefs in novel ways. Sometimes these new perspectives can change our fundamental experiences of a particular stimulus. For instance, if you're nervous before a performance, but joke with yourself that it'll go terribly then you might feel more comfortable. Your emotions, expectations, and overall dispositon to the same stimulus would have been drastically modifed/trasnformed by viewing it under a comedic light. Personally I find that comedy can reduce anxiety, increase openness to novel experiences, and ease the difficulty of thinking positively. The ability of humor to influence our core emotions and decision making processes lead me to believe that humor is not a trival escape from reality but a restructuring of reality as to make it more palatable, possibly more meaningful. Alternatively, given that humor is an abstraction, it also becomes easier to distance yourself from the underlying substrate of the joke, in which case it would be escapism. Do you guys have any thoughts on this; the role of humor in regards to existentialism?

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