Comedy Begins with Our Simplest Gestures: Levinas, Ethics, and Humor

“Comedy begins with our simplest gestures,” wrote Emmanuel Levinas in Entre Nous. To think about issues and theories of comedy through the lens of Levinasian thought, however, might itself sound like a joke, as Levinas rarely discussed humor in his published work, and his commitment to “ethics as first philosophy” in light of the horrors of the Holocaust hardly seems compatible with jokes and laughter. But far from trivializing the gravity of Levinas’s ethical thought, this volume rather aims to take comedy seriously, exploring the ethical encounter opened up in humor, laughter, and joking, as well as the comedic aspects of various types of human interaction.