Laughter and Absurdity: The Jewish People’s Improbable, Absurd and Eternal Existence

According to ancient Kabbalistic sources, every month of the Jewish calendar is associated with a different aspect of the human experience. The month of Adar, in which the festival of Purim falls, is associated with laughter. What is the deeper significance of laughter and how does it reveal the essence of Purim?

Aristotle and the later philosopher Thomas Hobbes maintained that humor is usually an expression of one’s superiority over another. It arises when one has avoided the pitfall into which the object of the joke has fallen. Sigmund Freud believed that jokes are masked aggression, a way to express violence or hostility toward another in a verbal format cloaked in humor. The philosopher Stephen Fry maintained that every joke is really a communication paradox—like when Yogi Berra famously remarked about a stadium, “No wonder no one comes here anymore; it’s always so crowded.” The German philosopher Schopenhauer believed that humor arose from incongruity and absurdity.