In a lecture at Google’s New York office in 2008, Simon Critchley, a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, referred to a consulting firm called Humor Solutions International, which was devoted to helping businesses foster employee loyalty and fellowship through laughter. That firm seems to have folded, but a quick online search brings up several others.
In his lecture, Critchley recalled a visit to a hotel in Atlanta, where long-suffering employees of an unidentified company were put through the paces of a structured activity designed to produce hilarity. He then recalled a later scene outside the hotel, where a subgroup of the same employees—the smokers—stood huddled together, talking and cracking jokes among themselves.11xSimon Critchley, “On Humor,” Authors@Google, May 14, 2008; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZLl5e1HfWc.
For many Americans today, this image captures the essential relationship between humor and the rituals and norms of a given social order—namely, that humor cannot be used to reinforce those rituals and norms, only to subvert them. In his lecture, Critchley allowed that this was true in the case of Humor Solutions International. But as a philosopher who has thought seriously about the comic, he also suggested that without laughter there can be no social order.