ON THE AESTHETIC DIMENSION OF HUMOR

From school, we are taught to appreciate art as something serious. Hav e you ever been in a museum? It is like a funeral. However, humor is o ne of the vehicles for the aesthetic experience to manifest itself in one of its purest forms. This is so because humor: 1. Relativizes the value of conscious reasoning in thought and introduces the activity of emotion in it; 2. Liberates us from om the unidirectionality of the c onventional (but naturalized) order of things; and 3. Places the indiv idual as center of the world as promoter of new ways to understand it.