Topical Guide 807
Mark Dorset
Humor: Ridiculous versus Ludicrous
At Home with the Glynns, Chapter 8:
RECALLING, NOW, the stories told about the Glynns then, I think I hear, with my adult’s ear, a tone that I’m certain I never noticed as a boy. The tales of the Glynns and their wacky way of life were told with the tone one might use for a story about a particularly dense pet dog. It was, to be technical, ridiculous. What inspired that tone might have been affection rather than contempt, but if it was affection, then it had something in it of the affection one feels for a pet dog, and so I guess I’d have to conclude that there was an underlying contempt whether the tone was affectionate or not.
Harry Levin, Playboys and Killjoys: An essay on the Theory and Practice of Comedy:
Now ridicule, the noun or verb in its etymological fullness, means laughing at (not with) somebody or something. I propose to call that vein of comedy, ridiculous. But there is another source of risibility, or the capacity for laughter, which goes even deeper, and which should perhaps be accorded priority, since it involves a positive response rather than a negative judgment. This, as opposed to the satirical point or the rational purpose of derision, is the hearty laugh that—as Konrad Lorenz puts it—creates a bond. To share the fun with others is to play, whether in sheer frivolity or free experiment. That distinctive reaction can be summed up in the adjective ludicrous, which means “playsome,” “sportive,” “jocular,” as differentiated from “ridiculous” by Lord Kames in an age when rationalism prevailed. Here the Latin root-word ludus has the same double meaning as the English play, both game and drama, and likewise as the French jeu and the German Spiel. Blurred together, ludicrous and ridiculous seem to have become loosely synonymous, but I should like to reaffirm the distinguishing nuance, as it was well understood by the Scottish rhetoricians.
See also:
Humor: Shaggy Dog Story: The Three Rabbits TG 150; Pun: Extended or Epic Pun TG 150; Humor: “A Sense of Humor”: Value of TG 413; Humor: the Knack for Creating; Humorous: the Knack for Being; Eutrapelia TG 468; Parody TG 492
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