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Comedy, especially in the form of satire, also specializes in deriding the self-importance of human beings. For instance, the notion that the United States Senate is “the world’s greatest deliberative body” warrants laughter and ridicule, given the absurdity of its proceedings. To take another example, it is no accident that dictators especially dislike being mocked, for they are deserving targets of mockery, given their grandiloquence and pathetic lust for political power. Are figures like Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump, and Jair Bolsonaro not utterly ridiculous, deserving of contempt and laughter? True, they are also dangerous individuals, responsible for the deaths of many innocent persons, but recognizing that fact is compatible with mockery of their absurd personas. Of course, the self-importance of human beings is not limited to politicians and dictators. Fortunately, tenured academics have little in the way of political power beyond their own institutions (and not much there, either), but it would be difficult to find a class of persons whose endeavors are both more trivial and more self-prized. When a full professor publicly excoriates a graduate student for allegedly misunderstanding some arcane point, it is certainly abusive but is also comical when one considers the abuser’s self-seriousness in the face of trivia. In a case like this, the victim deserves sympathy, but the abuser deserves (among other things) contemptuous and dismissive laughter. As with so many other human enterprises, academia deserves to be lampooned, as it is in the novels of David Lodge, for example.
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Toby Svoboda (A Philosophical Defense of Misanthropy (Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory))